











Oopight N?__ 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT, 




















The Story of the Oak Tree 


By Mrs. Ezra Bowen 



' 

EASTON, PA. 

THE CHEMICAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1924 


LONDON, ENGLAND: 

WILLIAMS & NORGATE, 

14 HENRIETTA 8TREET, COVENT GARDEN, W. C. 


TOKYO, japan: 

MARUZEN COMPANY, LTD. 

11-19 NIHONBA8HI TORI-SANCHOME 


QK^s 

.QaS& 


Copyright, 1924, By Edward Hart 



MAR 17 *24 


©C1A777567 


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PREFACE 


This little book was written in response to the demand 
for a school reader about Nature which would tell, not 
merely sentimental anecdotes about the bunny, the violet 
and the rose, but a continuous story of the life history 
of some living thing. The author chose the Oak Tree 
as her subject simply because its story serves as a 
complete illustration of that underlying fact of Nature, 
the interdependence of all things—the inseparable link¬ 
age of animate and inanimate, of atom, molecule, and 
substance, of soil, plant, animal, and man. 

To Professor Edward Hart, Dean of the Scientific 
Department, Eafayette College, and to Dr. James 
Waddell Tupper, Professor of English Eiterature at 
Eafayette College, the author wishes to make grateful 
acknowledgment for their helpful criticism in the prepa¬ 
ration of this book. 


Mrs. Ezra Bowen 



CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

CHAPTER I. 

Tree Feelings . I 

CHAPTER II. 

The Acorn, the Root and the Seedling Oak . 8 

CHAPTER HI. 

The Stem and the Branches . 18 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Leaf . 27 

CHAPTER V. 

What People are Made of ... 36 

CHAPTER VI. 

What Plants are Made of . 46 

CHAPTER VII. 

The Meaning of the Flower . 52 

CHAPTER VIII. 

The Bee and the Flower. 63 

CHAPTER IX. 

How Nature Created the First Plants . 75 

CHAPTER X. 

The Web of Life . 82 

CHAPTER XL 

More About the Web of Life—The Soil . 93 

CHAPTER XII. 

Wonders of Wood . 102 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Our Beautiful Forests . no 

CHAPTER XIV. 

The Man with the Microscope . 116 






























CHAPTER I 

Tree Feelings 



White Oak in Winter 


I wonder if they like it—being trees? 

I suppose they do. 

It must feel so good to have the ground so flat, 

And feel yourself stand straight up like that. 

So stiff in the middle, and then branch at ease, 

Big boughs that arch, small ones that bend and blow, 
And all those fringy leaves that flutter so. 

You’d think they’d break off at the lower end 







2 


the: STORY 01? THE OAK TREE 


When the wind fills them, and their great heads bend. 
But when you think of all the roots they drop, 

As much at bottom as there is on top, 

A double tree, widespread in earth and air, 

Like a reflection in the water there. 

Caroline Perkins Sutson. 

If you stood alone under an oak tree on a summer's 
day, and that oak tree could talk, it might have a great 
deal to say to you. Perhaps it would say: 

“Look here, you boy or girl, maybe you think because 
I can't run around the way you do, that I'm not just 
as much alive and as much use in the world as you are. 
Well—maybe not quite as much alive nor quite as useful, 
because nothing in all Nature is as much alive or as 
important as man, but I want you to know I'm more than 
a stick of wood to be cut up for chairs and tables! I'm 
a plant, a living plant, like my half-brother the pine and 
my sweet cousin the rose, and even my homely great- 
niece the cabbage. You’re an animal, and I'm a plant, 
and in the order of the living world plants come next 
beneath animals. And not so very far beneath, either. 
Animals live on plants; if every plant in the ground 
should shrivel up and die, all you men and animals would 
die of starvation very soon after. I’m not much of a 
food plant myself, like a bean or a potato, but doesn’t 


tree eeeungs 


3 


the farmer’s pig root up and eat my acorns, and then who 
eats the pig ? Why, you do, and very sweet he tastes, too, 
when roasted in the oven all brown and sugary. 

Men have always been friendly to me. When I was 
an acorn my mother, who was five hundred years old, 
used to tell me things she had heard her father say—I 
guess he heard them from his father in turn—about how 
long centuries ago men used to worship me as a god. 
They thought anything so big and strong, anything that 
lived so many hundred years, must have some kind of a 
god inside it. Your own forefathers in England, the 
Druids, fierce men and heathen, hunters and fighters, had 
groves of sacred oaks. Whatever grew upon an oak they 
looked upon as a gift from heaven, especially mistletoe. 
When they found mistletoe growing around my great 
grandfather’s trunk, they would fetch a priest in a white 
robe and he would take his golden knife and cut off the 
mistletoe. My grandfather would have been flattered 
and pleased by this attention if he had not been so dis¬ 
gusted by the cruel custom of sacrificing two white bulls 
right under his branches every time the mistletoe was cut. 

And even earlier than this, down on the shores of the 
warm Mediterranean Sea the ancient Greeks had a temple 
at Dodona. The temple was dedicated to Zeus, and near 
the temple was an old, old oak tree which the Greeks said 


4 


THE) STORY OR THR OAK TRRR 


contained an oracle—a god who could foretell events. 
The priests who tended this oak slept on the ground be¬ 
neath its branches; when the time came to ask the oracle 
a question, these priests would raise their heads and catch 
the answer in the rustling of the myriad leaves above. 
When the breeze was not blowing and the leaves made no 
sound the priests found their answers in the moaning of 
the doves upon the spreading branches. 

Wise men of Greece in later years, philosophers whose 
names are still revered, believed that we trees could see, 
and hear, and feel, and think. Maybe you have helped 
to plant a tree on Arbor Day, or maybe you have watched 
them plant a tree after the ceremony of laying the 
cornerstone of a new church, or school, or public library. 
Have you ever wondered why they did this? I will tell 
you why. It is the last remnant of the beliefs of your 
ancestors, who thought the life of a man and the life of 
a tree were bound up together. When a child was born 
those ancient people would fix upon some young tree as 
that child’s tree. If the tree grew tall and strong, the 
child grew tall and strong; if the tree sickened and died, 
it was ten to one the boy would die too. In Africa to¬ 
day there live savages who abandon their homes and fly 
from their village forever if the sacred tree of the village 
dies. In ancient Rome there stood in the market place a 
fig tree sacred to Romulus, founder of that great city. 


TREE EEEEINGS 


5 


One summer when the fig tree withered and died the 
whole population was thrown into the greatest excite¬ 
ment. 

There is a story three thousand years old; it comes 
from Egypt, and it is called the Tale of the Two Brothers. 
One of the brothers left his heart on the top of a tree. 
As long as the tree stood that brother lived happily, but 
when his enemy felled the tree that brother died. 

Right here in your own land, in Hartford, Connecticut, 
there stood an oak tree—my great-uncle, by the way— 
called the Charter Oak of Hartford. It was believed to 
be several hundred years old. When the pioneer settlers 
were felling trees to clear the land, the Indians begged 
them to spare the oak. “It has been the guide of our 
ancestors for centuries,” they said, “as to the time of 
planting our corn. When the leaves are the size of a 
mouse’s ears, then is the time to put the seed into the 
ground.” The white men respected the Indians’ wish, 
and the oak outlived many generations of settlers. In the 
summer of 1856 it fell in a fierce wind storm, and the 
sorrowful people tolled the sunset bells that evening and 
brought their musicians to play a funeral dirge over the 
mighty fallen trunk. 

Well, my grandfather never had much fun out of being 
worshiped, and I don’t think I’d like it much myself. 


6 


the: story of the oak trff 


You don’t make any friends by 
being worshiped. No, I don’t 
want to be worshiped, I want to 
be understood. I want you 
humans to be real friends with 
me, and that means you will 
have to study me a little, in 
order to get acquainted. Study 
my roots and trunk and leaves; 
find out how I live and eat; whether I ever go to sleep; 
how I keep warm and how I feed my children, the 
acorns. 



Acorns from Scarlet Oak 


Do you know why I 
haven’t legs to run 
around in search of 
food the way animals 
do ? Because I don’t 
need to! I can dig my 
roots into the moist soil 
and stay comfortably 
just where I am, be¬ 
cause I eat water and 
sunlight. Yes, I do! 

Water from the soil 
and sunlight from above 

Reaves of White Oak 



tree: eeeungs 


7 


the earth. I have a pretty good time doing it, too. I’d 
like to go on and tell you myself just how my leaves 
turn that sunlight into food, because it’s as wonderful 
as magic, but my uncle the chestnut oak told me once 
that other people always know more about you than you 
do yourself, so I’m going to let the lady in this book do 
the telling. 

And when she is all through, if you read what she 
writes, I think you and I will be much better friends than 
ever we were before!” 


CHAPTER II 


The Acorn, the Root and the Seedling Oak 

Every boy and girl knows what an acorn looks like. 
Haven’t you ever found an acorn with a bulging, curly 
end made of tiny woody scales, and pulled the end off 
and hollowed out the nut to make a cup and saucer? 
Acorns from the red oak make the best cups and saucers, 
and acorns from the scarlet oak make the best tops for 
spinning. They are small tops, of course, but they whirl 
as merrily as any of your big, showy, painted ones. 


Every tree bears 
its fruit; just as the 
apple is the fruit of 
the apple tree, so is 
the acorn the fruit of 
the oak. And in the 
fruit lies the seed. 
Warm and dry and 



Cup and Saucer made from Acorns 
of Red Oak 


protected, when in Autumn the ripe fruit falls from the 
branch the seed sleeps there in its acorn coat, waiting 
to be planted, waiting for Spring and the feel of the moist 
earth pressing its sides to waken it once more to life 
and growth. 

We humans think we are great travellers, and so we 
are, some of us. But plants travel too, they journey 



THE ACORN, THE ROOT AND THE SEEDLING OAK 9 


over land and sea; they leave their homes and settle in 
strange countries. When we set out we carry a great 
bother of luggage with us, but plants travel as light as the 
wind. They travel as seeds. When the mother plant 
bears light seeds such as the dandelion or the fir tree, 
the wind snatches up handfuls of it and scatters it far and 
wide. Every plant yields many, many more seeds than 
will ever grow. If one seed in ten thousand grows, 
Nature is satisfied. Inside the poppy are cuddled thirty- 
two thousand seeds. If all these seeds became flowers 
there would be poppies, poppies everywhere—enough to 
put us all to sleep! Sometimes seeds have wings, like 
the thistle and the milkweed. Have you never pulled a 
handful of ripe milkweed from the pod and blown it 
into the air to watch the seeds sail upward and away on 
their white silken wings ? Where the mother plant 
leans out over a stream the seeds will fall perhaps in the 
water and be whirled away; if the river is broad and 
deep the swift current will carry the seed even out to the 
ocean, and it will be washed up to grow on foreign shores. 

Of course, a seed has to be strong and hardy to endure 
a bath in salt water, to endure being battered by the wind 
and scorched dry by the sun, or to lie unprotected on 
frozen, wintry ground waiting to be planted. Some 
seeds can be left for dozens of years and will grow when 
covered with earth. The little seed is the hardiest part 


IO 


THE STORY OF THE OAK TREE 


of the tree. The tall mother tree needs a constant supply 
of food, it needs a certain evenness of climate and it 
must have sunlight, but it knows how to build for its 
seed such a close woven coat that the seed can go to sleep 
for years and forget all about food and shelter. 

The acorn is not as hardy as some other seeds. It must 
have a certain amount of moisture; if it dries up, it dies. 
Naturally, a big clumsy seed like an acorn cannot travel 
on the wind. Many seeds too heavy to be blown by the 
breeze are carried by birds; a bird will alight and walk 
about on muddy ground, and when it rises into the air soil 
sticks to its feet. In the soil seeds may be hidden; when 
the earth dries on the bird’s feet, the seeds fall to the 
ground. There are seeds, like the apple seed, with coats 
so tough the birds cannot digest them; when a robin, 
pecking at an apple, swallows an apple seed the seed 
passes through the bird’s body and drops to earth. 

But birds do not carry acorns. When a ripe acorn 
falls, its first wish, if it has any wishes, is to get away 
from under the branches of the parent tree. It can¬ 
not grow there, because those leafy branches will shade 
away the sunlight it loves, and those big roots will reach 
out and absorb the food in the earth for yards around, 
so that there will not be enough left for the hungry little 
acorn. So the acorn lies there and lies there, helpless. 
Once or twice the wind turns it over, and once a boy 


the; acorn, the root AND The SEEDEING OAK 11 

picks it up as he passes by and looks as if he would like to 
bite into it to try if it be sweet or bitter. Lucky for him 
that he throws it away, because this acorn comes from a 
scarlet oak, and only the white oak bears sweet fruit! 

At last the acorn is away from under the mother tree. 
There it lies in the sunshine. If only someone would 
come and plant it in the ground! It has no power of 
gathering its own food, either water or sunlight; it needs 
no food now while it is asleep, but within its shell is 
stored food all carefully prepared by the mother tree. 
And because this food is so carefully prepared, it is good 
food for animals. 

The squirrel knows this, and along he comes frisking, 
tail up; he seizes that acorn between his sharp teeth and 
scurries off with it. But because he is a thrifty animal 
he does not eat the nut; winter will soon be here and 
food will be scarce, so he buries it carefully not far from 
his home, meaning to come back one day when he is 
especially hungry and dig it up. 

But he never comes back because he forgets all about it, 
or else he cannot find the spot where he has buried it so 
carefully. 

So the winter long the acorn sleeps snugly under¬ 
ground. 

And then comes Spring! 


2 


12 


the: story of the; oak trff 


And with Spring the germ within the acorn, the magic, 
mysterious, living germ begins to grow. The acorn 

bursts into life! You 
have seen onions sprout, 
have you not, when the 
cook left them too long 
in the warm kitchen 
cupboard? Well, the 
acorn sprout curves 
down into the earth, 
feeling for the moisture 
which feeds it. Very 
soon after this first 
shoot has taken hold, 
another shoot grows up 
to the air, feeling in its 
turn for light and for 
the plant food con¬ 
tained in the air. The downward growth is the root, 
and the other is the crown growth, because stem, 
branches and leaves together are called the crown of 
the tree, For a time the growth of both root and 
stem is sustained by food that has been stored in the 
acorn by the mother tree, but soon the tiny root hairs 
along the outside of the roots become strong enough to 
absorb their own moisture. 



THE ACORN, THE ROOT AND THE SEEDLING OAK 13 


What is it, do you suppose, that makes the root grow 
down and the stem grow up? People have been so 
curious to find out the reason for this that they have 
made experiments to try to fool the root. They have 
twisted the acorn round so the stem would grow down 
and the root up, but every time the wise root and stem 
have righted themselves and grown the way they knew 
was best for them. The only attraction that can bring 
the root upward is water. Roots are such thirsty things 
that when the soil is very dry and water is above, they 
will follow the moisture. 

Down there in the moist darkness that it loves the tiny 
root begins to grow. It feels its way straight down into 
the earth, for this first shoot is the central root of the 
tree, the tap root, and the tap root always grows straight 
down. The end of this root is so sensitive that men have 
called it the brain of the tree. It grows against some¬ 
thing rough, is slightly wounded, and turns away from 
the thing that has scratched it. There is a great scientist 
named Mr. Arthur Thomson who understands the trees 
so well that he can tell you better than I can just how the 
root moves. 

“It moves gently,” he says, “against grains of soil, and 
the touch causes it to move gently to and fro; it feels its 
way through the cracks of the soil. It comes to a dry 
region and bends to the moister side.” 


14 


THR story or thr oak trkr 


Growing things, you see, are very sensitive. If a grow¬ 
ing stem be sharply struck it curves as though in pain, 
and stays curved for some time. When a root feels the 
pressure of a stone, it grows more slowly until it has 
grown around the stone. Climbing plants, however, like 
to feel something hard pressing against them; not until 
it feels the porch pillar against it does the Virginia 
Creeper begin to cling and climb in earnest. If you had 
something fastened to the top of your head which pulled 
you gently upward all the time, I doubt whether, when 
you are twenty, you would be much taller than Nature 
has already planned—but it helps growing plants to be 
pulled along. Trailing stems in a stream grow longer 
when the current is swift than when it is slow. 

Roots have two important things to do; one is to ab¬ 
sorb water, and the other is to hold up the tree. We have 
told how little, delicate hairs grow out along the root; 
it is these hairs which absorb the moisture. Every 
Autumn when the leaves die these hairs die also, because 
in winter the ground is frozen hard and the roots can 
gather no water. The tree in winter lives upon food 
stored up in summer, but the next Spring new little 
hairs begin to grow upon the roots and reach out for more 
water to feed the thirsty tree trunk. 

You know now what sensitive, exploring things roots 
are, but do you know how strong they are, and how 


the acorn, the) root and the seedring oak 15 

deep they grow? They are the long, muscular fingers 
of the tree, thrust down into the earth to hold the heavy 
trunk and branches when the fierce winds blow. A 
great oak tree stands on the hillside near my home. In 
winter when the north winds sweep the hill front I 
have seen that oak bend until I thought it must break 
and crash to its death, but those strong and loyal fingers 
gripping the earth beneath held it in safety. Some roots 
have been known to grow as deep as twenty feet into 
the ground. There is as much tree underground as 
there is above; woodsmen and foresters say you can 
measure the roots by the branches; that is, they say the 
roots extend below ground as far as the branches are 
spread above. This is not strictly true, but it is truth 
to say there is as much tree below ground as above, only 
below ground the roots are bunched together in a thick 
mass. 

Roots, as well as trunk and branches, put on a coat of 
bark. Did you ever try to pull up a tree, just a little, 
slender sapling? If you did, I believe you had a pretty 
hard pull before you decided you would just let that tree 
stand after all. Some roots are so tough and strong that 
our forefathers made fences of them after they had 
pulled up the stumps to clear the land for tillage. In 
New England you can see to this day fences built more 
than a hundred years ago of stout white pine roots. 


16 THE) STORY OR THE) OAK TRE)E) 

It is a brave fight the acorn puts up before the sapling 
grows big enough to take care of itself. Read what 
Robert Douglas says about this fight: 

“The acorn is the only seed I can think of which is left 
by Nature to take care of itself. It matures without pro¬ 
tection, falls heavily and helplessly to the ground to be 
eaten or trodden on by animals, yet the few which escape 
and those which are trodden under are well able to com¬ 
pete in the race for life. While the elm and maple seeds 
are drying up on the surface, the hickories and walnuts 
waiting to be cracked, the acorn is at work with its coat 
off. It drives its tap root into the earth in spite of grass 
and brush and litter. No matter if it is shaded by forest 
trees so that the sun cannot penetrate; it will manage to 
make a short stem and a few leaves the first season, 
enough to keep life in the root which will drill deeper 
and deeper. When age or accident removes the tree 
which has overshadowed it, then it will assert itself. 
Fires may run over the land destroying almost everything 
else; the oak will be killed to the ground but it will throw 
up a new shoot the next spring, the root will keep enlarg¬ 
ing and when the opportunity comes will make a vigorous 
growth and throw out strong side roots and often care 
no more for its tap root which has been its only support 
than the frog cares for the tail of the tadpole after it 
has got on its own legs.” 


THE ACORN, THE ROOT AND THE SEEDRING OAK 17 


A brave fight, little acorn! We want you to win it,— 
what shall we do to help you? 

“Plant me in the Spring,” you cry, “when the squirrels 
and mice have plenty of other food and won’t scratch for 
me and dig me up! Plant me in the Spring, and give 
me plenty of room; don’t crowd me in between other 
trees or other acorns. Give me plenty of sunlight, and 
for three or four years, while I am still a frail seedling 
oak, care for me a little. 

Then I’ll show what I can do!” 


CHAPTER III 

The Stem and the Branches 

Full in the midst of his own strength he stands 
Stretching his brawny arms and leafy hands 
His shade protects the plains, his head the hill 
commands. 

Virgil. 

No wonder the Latin poet wrote this way about the 
oak. There is a majesty about an oak tree that reminds 
one of a king of olden time, a king of the Vikings, strong 
and unconquered, lifting his crowned head proudly to 
the storm. And indeed there live oak trees which have 
seen the birth and death of many a king; oaks stand to¬ 
day in England which were saplings when William the 
Conqueror landed with his Norman warriors. Always 
the oak has been the symbol of strength and loyalty. 

I saw a moving picture once, about. Robin Hood and 
his band of merry outlaws who lived in Sherwood Forest, 
in England, so long ago. Robin Hood was a true knight, 
it was all a mistake that he was outlawed; he and his men 
spent their days in righting the wrongs of the oppressed ; 
they robbed the rich to feed the poor. One day Sher¬ 
wood Forest was surrounded by the soldiers of the cruel 
Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin Hood gave his order, 

“To the trees, my men!” 


the stem and the branches 


i9 


Stealthily the sheriff’s soldiers closed in about the 
glades of the forest where they knew Robin Hood and 
his men made their home. 

“Aha,” they said, “we have caught our bird this time 
unaware!” 

Suddenly they heard the whizz of arrows; arrows 
seemed to rain from the sky. They cried surrender and 
looked up. There were Robin Hood’s men, swarming 
in the trees above. Along the broad branches of the 
great oaks they leaped and ran, bows in hand, their coats 
and caps of Lincoln green splashed with the sunlight 
which filtered down between the leaves. 

Small wonder that the soldiers cried, “Enough!” 

Look at an oak in winter if you would see its true 
grandeur, in winter when it is stripped of leaves. Yonder 
towers its great trunk, one hundred feet high; its mas¬ 
sive gnarled limbs show strength to their very twig tips. 

It seems hardly fitting, does it, to speak of this great 
trunk as a stem? Daisies have stems, and violets have 
stems, but daisies and violets are only little modest 
flowering plants. And that is what the oak tree is—a 
flowering plant. There is nothing little and modest about 
it, to be sure, but it is a plant just the same, and is 
made up, like all the higher plants, of a root, a stem with 
branches, and leaves. The stem does two things; it 
holds the branches aloft, spreading the leaves to the sun- 


20 


THE) STORY OR THE) OAK TRE)E) 


light, and it serves as a channel through which water 
containing plant food rises and flows from root to leaf 

r .Puter Bark 
;..Inner Bark 

-—Cambium 

-Summer Wood 

--- «Spring Wood. 

~ ^53-—Annual f?mo 

■•Medullary l?ay 


.2 c 



c -2 

CO 
OO 

c 


O 

Q; 




to 


'Inner darR^ 
'Outer 6cjrk » 

<Scip Woo<4»-*' 


/•- Med Ray 


™ Spnno Woocj 


’--Heart Wood 












THE STEM AND THE BRANCHES 


21 


and down again to nourish each living part. The 
branches are part of the trunk and do the same work. 

If you look at the drawing you will see how a tree 
trunk is built, and you will understand how the tree 
grows. 

On the outside, as you know, is the rough bark. This 
is the tree’s coat, to keep it warm, and the tree’s armor to 
keep it from being bruised or punctured. Right next in¬ 
side the bark grows a thin layer of delicate wood called 
the cambium. When a boy takes a block of wood to 
carve out a whistle, he will find that the easiest way to 
strip off the bark is to run his jack knife down this cam¬ 
bium layer. The cambium is the vital part of the trunk, 
the only part which never sleeps nor withers from the 
birth of the tree to its death. All up and down this thin 
cambium layer is stored the winter long food for the 
young buds and roots of next Spring, because, as you 
will remember, the buds and roots must be fed until 
they grow strong enough to gather nourishment for them¬ 
selves. A storehouse of food means to us shelves of 
apples and potatoes and nuts and sugar, so that if we cut 
down a tree in winter we might think that next Spring’s 
buds and roots would have a very thin diet, because the 
starch and the sugar in the cambium storehouse, like all 
other stored plant food, is invisible to us. 


22 


THE) STORY OR THE) OAK TRE)R 


Each year, commencing in the Spring, onto the outer 
surface of the cambium layer—that is, the part next to 
the bark—grows a new strip of bark. This new strip, 
together with other growth within the trunk, pushes out 
and strains the old bark until it cracks and dies. Then it 
falls off the tree and the new bark takes its place. Trees, 
just like boys and girls, do their most rapid growing be¬ 
tween March and July. Did you know that? Boys and 
girls grow tall in Spring, and in the Fall they put on 
weight,—like the plant they store up food for future 
use, because fat is stored food. In early summer, at the 
time of the tree’s most rapid growth, you can pull a strip 
of bark from an oak without hurting the tree. Pull off 
the bark, and underneath you will see the cambium. 
Then, if the cambium be carefully shaded from the 
scorching sun, or if the weather remain moist and cloudy 
for a few days, the cambium will grow a coat of bark 
right over the bared and tender surface—provided the 
surface has not been bruised or broken. A young tree 
can be stripped of its bark for several feet and heal its 
own wound, but to strip a tree is not a kind thing to do. 

At the same time that the cambium is growing its yearly 
outside strip, it is also adding an inside layer. These 
yearly layers can be plainly seen on the sawed-off trunk 
of an oak. They go round and round, and if you count 
them you will know just how old the tree is, because each 


the} ste}m and THE} branched 


23 


of the rings means a year’s growth. Now, this inside 
layer which the cambium grows is the sapwood, the part 
of the trunk where the sap, or plant food, flows up and 
down to the leaves and roots. At first this new layer is 
tender and spongy so that the sap can move freely; at 
this early time it is called Spring Wood. As the summer 
advances the Spring Wood becomes harder and firmer; 
then it is called Summer Wood. After a long, long time, 
perhaps when the tree is thirty or even seventy-five years 
old, the pores—invisible holes and ducts through which 
the sap flowed—fill up with gums or other solid matter. 
Then, when the sap can no longer flow through it the sap- 
wood is called Heartwood; new sapwood has grown all 
around and outside it, and this old remaining heartwood 
is the pith of the tree. 

We do not entirely understand the use of this tree 
pith, we do not know exactly what part it plays in the 
busy life of the tree. The pith can dry and rot away 
until the inside of the tree is entirely hollow, like a 
hollow pillar, yet the tree lives and grows. When a 
tree is diseased men can cut out great chunks of the rot¬ 
ting wood and fill up the cavity with cement, just as the 
dentist can fill your tooth with cement and not injure 
the living tissue which surrounds the filling. 

If you will look once more at the picture of the sawed 
log you will see some lines going out from the center like 


24 


the story or thr oak trrr 


the spokes of a wheel. These streaks of wood are harder 
than the pith, and they are called pith rays, because they 
glance out from the pith as rays stream out from the 
sun. When foresters saw a log this way, the saw, as it 
runs through the center of the tree, will cut the same way 
the pith rays run; that is parallel with the pith rays. The 
pith rays run in wavy lines, so boards cut from the center 
along these rays will show wavy lines or streaks. In oak 
timber these shiny streaks are called “silver sheen;” the 
wood cut in this way is known as quartered oak and is 
the choicest timber of the tree. Perhaps your mother 
has a dining room table or a library table made of quar¬ 
tered oak; look at its smooth polished surface and trace 
the beautiful pattern of the “silver sheen.” 

And now that you understand how the stem is built— 
bark, cambium, sapwood and pith—it is time to speak of 
something marvelous, something the tree does which has 
puzzled wise men for a long time, and puzzles them still. 
There are men, great scientists, who spend their lives 
studying plants, plants of all kinds, high and low, from 
the lichen that grows on the rock to the noblest oak that 
ever spread its leafy branches to the sun. The study of 
plants is called botany, so these men are known as bot¬ 
anists; and little by little, as the centuries go by these 
botanists have coaxed from Mother Nature her secrets. 
They have had to be patient, because Nature guards her 


THE STEM AND THE BRANCHES 


25 


secrets jealously; they have had to work through dis¬ 
couragement that would have made you or me give up 
long ago, and there are still many secrets which Nature 
has not yet yielded to their understanding. And this is 
one of them: 

What makes the sap run up the tree ? 

We said a while ago that the tree stem has two duties 
to perform; it holds the branches aloft, spreading the 
leaves to the sun, and it serves as a channel through which 
water containing plant food—in other words, the sap— 
rises and flows from root to leaf and down again to 
nourish each living part. But what makes the sap rise? 
There is no giant lying hidden in the earth, ready to put 
his mouth to the stem base and puff out his great cheeks 
and blow the sap up the tall trunk to the highest twig! 
And there is no wood fairy on the highest leaf to put her 
lips to the twig and with a magic breath suck the sap up 
from the roots! Boys and girls, what makes the sap 
circulate in your own healthy bodies ? Blood, you know, 
is our sap; it flows from our toes to our finger tips to 
nourish the living cells of our bodies. And what makes 
it flow? The heart, you say! And right you are; the 
heart is the strong and tireless engine which pumps the 
blood through our limbs. But who can find the heart of 
a tree, or who can discover any strong pump to send the 
sap spurting up the trunk ? 


26 


THE) STORY OF THE) OAK TREE) 


Naturally enough, the botanists have made guesses 
about this mystery, and good enough guesses too, but 
they are not satisfied with their own guesses. They 
have guessed that something called root pressure makes 
the sap ascend, something called osmotic pressure, and 
another something they name capillary attraction draws 
the sap up along the trunk. But do not let anybody 
frighten you by big words. If you study the trees and 
come to know them and to love them, I should not be 
surprised if one of you, when you are grown, and have 
learned much, much more about the trees than I can tell 
you, should lean your ear some day to the root of an 
oak and hear the great secret! 

Wood-Grain 

This is the way that the sap river ran 
From the root to the top of the tree 
Silent and dark 
Under the bark 
Working a wonderful plan 
That the leaves never know, 

And the branches that grow 
On the brink of the tide never see. 

John B. Tabb. 


CHAPTER IV 

The Leaf 

Nobody has to be told how beautiful the Spring is. 
We all know that without being told. We should know it 
if we were blind; we could lift our nostrils to the soft¬ 
ness of the air and the freshness of new things growing 
in the earth. All the living world—men and animals 



leaves From White Oak 


and plants—can feel the coming of Spring. But still the 
poets have to tell us about it. They tell us about the 
apple blossoms and the cherry blossoms and the pear 


3 


28 


THE) STORY OF THE) OAK TRE)E) 


blossoms—fluffy white and glowing pink—about the fra¬ 
grant hawthorne and every other brilliantly blossoming 
tree. They commence with April and go right through 

to June, and then when they 
get to June they can pick 
up a fresh start with roses. 
It is all very pretty, only I 
think they make a great mis¬ 
take in leaving out the oak 
tree. 

The oak does not make a 
brilliant show with blossoms; 
I doubt if you have ever even 
noticed the shy flowering 
sprays drooping among her branches, but the little new 
oak leaves can play the most wonderful tricks with color 
as they uncurl and grow. When the leaves of the white 
oak unfold from the bud they are spread with a silky 
down which shimmers in the sun with silver mistiness. 
Day by day these little leaves pass through soft and 
pearly changes of delicate pink and silvery white until 
they reach their yellow green maturity. 

You may be sure that canny old Mother Nature did 
not design these oak leaves solely that we might enjoy 
their beauty. Everything in this living world has its use 
and does its work, every plant and every lowly animal. 



Chestnut Oak leaves 


the: leap 


29 


If they are beautiful, as they always are when seen in 
their proper setting, why, so much the better! And 
every part of every plant helps to nourish it or protect 
it, just as every part of you, from your stomach to your 
skin, is either nourishing you or giving you protection. 
You know what the bark does for the tree; it does the 
same thing that your skin does for you, and you know 
what the rest of the trunk does, and what the roots do. 
What part do you suppose the leaves play in the life of 
the tree? 

The leaves are the tree’s many kitchens, where the raw 
food—air and sunlight—is prepared for the tree’s diges¬ 
tion. When you hold an oak leaf in your hand you can 
see in it a line running through the center and little lines 
or veins branching out from the central vein. It is 
through these veins that the root moisture runs into the 
leaf, and then, when it has been mixed with the air- 
food prepared in the leaf kitchen, it runs back again 
through these veins into the twigs and down through the 
trunk. When they first told me that the leaves take in 
air as food for the tree I said, “Yes, but how does the 
leaf do it ? I cannot see any opening in this leaf for the 
air and sunlight to come in!” “No,” they said, “you can¬ 
not see any opening, but the openings are there just the 
same, and the man with the microscope can show them to 
you any day. If he puts an oak leaf under his microscope 


30 


THE STORY OE THE OAK TREE 


and you close one eye and look through the little glass and 
listen to what he says, you will see this 

The leaf has two layers of skin which enclose and pro¬ 
tect the veins we noticed with our naked eye. The lower 
skin is pierced by thousands of openings—tiny holes— 
one hundred thousand to a space as big as two postage 
stamps. Through these openings—the man with the 
microscope would call them stomata —flows in that part 
of the air which the leaf can use. At the same time, 
water is flowing into the leaf from the branches. In 
each cell, or tiny living division of the leaf, is a magic 
fluid which turns the air and water into starches and 
sugars which the tree can digest. This magic fluid is 
what makes the leaf green, so we call it leaf-green, but 
the man with the microscope calls it chlorophyll, a word 
which he made up from two old Greek words: chloros, 
meaning “green,” and phulon, “a leaf.” 

Did anyone ever tell you that it is healthy to have 
green plants in the room? I think you have been told 
of that, and perhaps you wondered why it was so. The 
air we breathe contains two important elements; one, 
called oxygen, is good for us and enters our blood. The 
other, called carbon dioxide, is a poisonous gas to us and 
to all animals, but plants live on it. It is made up of 
carbon and oxygen. Plants’ leaves absorb the carbon, 
and through their stomata they breathe out the good 


THE) LE)AF 


31 


element, the oxygen. The animals in their turn absorb 
this oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide for the plants. 
So that plants and animals are both satisfied. This is a 
very wise and lucky arrangement made by that careful 
housewife, Mother Nature, who gives plenty to her 
children, but sees to it that nothing is wasted. 

This tree-breathing, this sucking in of carbon and giv¬ 
ing ofif of oxygen which is just the opposite of animal 
breathing, is called transpiration. In the scheme of Na¬ 
ture this transpiration, or pushing out of oxygen, is a 
very important process. It goes on all day and all night 
—but most busily in the daylight—throughout the entire 
tree; the oxygen passes from cell to cell along the trunk 
and branches until it reaches the leaves and escapes 
through the tiny stomata in the leaf skin. If it could not 
breathe off this oxygen the tree would smother, just as 
you would smother if you could not breathe off the pois¬ 
onous carbon dioxide. You see, the tree takes in fifty 
times as much of this burning sun-power as it can use; 
if it could not get rid of what was left over, the tree’s 
temperature would rise in a few minutes high enough to 
kill it. Which is just another way of saying the tree 
would smother. 

Plant breathing is called transpiration, animal breath¬ 
ing is called respiration. You must know, however, 
that respiration, or breathing off of carbon, goes on in 


32 


THE STORY OR THE OAK TREE 


trees too, but it is a very faint breathing, best observed 
at night when the sun-drinking chlorophyll is not work¬ 
ing. 

You know now why your mother sets her pretty potted 
plants in the window; she wants to give the chlorophyll 
or leaf-green a chance to catch the sunlight. When it is 
dark there is just as much plant-food in the air and in the 
water as when the sun shines, but the chlorophyll needs 
the heat of the sun’s rays to help prepare the air-food and 
water-food into starches and sugars which the tree can 
digest. It is the work done by the chlorophyll which 
makes it possible for us to eat plants and vegetables; we 
cannot digest air or sunlight, but we can digest them 
after the chlorophyll has finished working upon them. 
You see what sincere thanks we owe to the chloro¬ 
phyll, for from the simple starches, sugars and other 
foods prepared in the leaf kitchen come all other foods 
whatever, for animal as well as for plant. It is to the 
leaf that we must turn to discover the elements upon 
which we feed and grow; and from which we are in the 
last testing composed. 

That the leaves may catch this life-giving sunlight the 
forest oak grows tall and straight; its trunk bears no 
branches lower down where they would be overshadowed 
by other trees. Have you not seen plant leaves struggling 
out of the shadow? The ivy spreads itself upon the 


the: te:af 


33 


sunny wall; the vine creeps up the latticed porch to find 
the sun. Plant an oak in a broad and roomy field, and its 
tall trunk will not shoot up bare of branches. Wherever 
leaves can face the sun, there the branches will grow and 
spread, and there the leaves will lie in a lacy pattern, no 
one in the shadow of the other. 

The very humblest plants contain no chlorophyll; they 
cannot absorb and prepare the air-food, but must, like 
the mistletoe which twines about the oak, fasten them¬ 
selves upon some other plant, and steal food from their 
hosts. Such plants—and there are many—are called pat- 
asites, from the Greek words para, “beside, and sitos, 
“food.” 

Why must the tree eat? We know why we need food, 
we need it to keep our bodies warm. When you are 
healthy, if you put a doctor’s thermometer in your mouth 
you will find that your bodily temperature is ninety-eight 
degrees; even on the coldest winter day, when your toes 
and fingers are numb and your nose as red as an apple, 
your body temperature will not sink below ninety-eight. 
The food we eat is the fuel which keeps our bodily fires 
hot. But a tree has no such high temperature; the tree 
lives at a low temperature, it moves very little and uses 
up no energy running about as we do. Compared with 
an animal, a tree is only half awake, and anything that 
is half asleep uses up less energy than a running, hunting 


34 


THE STORY OR THE OAK TREE 


animal. If you sprained your ankle and were put to bed 
for a week, you would not need as much food as you 
do when you are out rolling snowballs or playing tag. 

The tree needs food for two things: growth, and stor¬ 
age. It is during the Spring and early Summer that the 
leaves do their hardest work, and during those months, 
of course, the tree has its most rapid growth. In the leaf 
kitchen is prepared food for the tree to digest right away, 
and food to store up in the cambium for the nourishment 
of next year’s tender early buds. I think you can see 
why it is so important for the tree to be able to store up 
food. When Winter comes the birds fly south to warm 
countries, bears roll up in their fur and sleep away 
the cold months in some snug cave, but the oak tree 
must stay where its roots have taken hold, no matter 
how fiercely the icy wind may blow. The best way for 
the tree to protect itself is to pass into an inactive, rest¬ 
ing state, to stop growing and go to sleep until the ground 
thaws. To do this it must first store up food to last 
the winter and to be ready, as we have said, for the 
buds when they are stirred to life in the Spring. This 
power to creep within their own well-stocked fortresses 
and hold over winter food for their offspring the open¬ 
ing buds and young roots is the power which keeps the 
race of trees and plants alive from generation to genera¬ 
tion. 


THE EEAE 


35 


When Autumn comes the leaf has done its work. The 
chlorophyll retreats to the woody part of the tree; with¬ 
out its magic fluid the oak leaf turns red, a purplish red 
which lights the autumn forest in a blaze of glory like 
the embers of a dying fire. People think the frost turns 
the leaves to red and gold and purple, but they are mis¬ 
taken ; it is old age which causes autumn foliage. When 
you are old your skin will wrinkle and your hair will turn 
white, so with the leaf in autumn when it is old and 
tired comes a change from the living green. A little 
cork or stopper forms between stem and twig so that all 
life is shut off; then the winds of November snatch the 
dry brown leaf and whirl it in its last wild dance to earth. 


CHAPTER V 

What People are Made of 

When you were a good deal smaller than you are now, 
and when instead of going to school you played at home 
in the nursery, perhaps your mother used to say over to 
you an old rhyme that my mother used to say to me. It 
was about what girls and boys are made of, and although 
I liked it very much, it used to make my baby brother 
quite cross. It went like this: 

My mother would say, 

“What are little girls made of, made of ?” 

And I would answer, 

“Sugar and spice and everything nice, 

That’s what little girls are made of!” 

Then somebody, usually one of us children, would ask 
my brother, 

“What are little boys made of, made of?” 

He wouldn’t answer at first, but after awhile we would 
tease him into shouting, all in one breath, 
“Snips-and-snails-and-puppy-dogs’-tails, 

That's what little boys are made of!” 

When my brother grew up, he went to the Medical 
School and learned to be a doctor, a student of the human 
body. It takes ten years of study before they call you a 
doctor, and do you know, I often think that my brother 


WHAT PEOPLE ARE MADE OE 


37 


studied all those years just so he could find out what he 
really was made of, and what his teasing sisters were 
made of! 

If someone asked you what you were made of, you 
would be very quick with your reply ; 

“Flesh and blood and bones!” 

But if this curious-minded person went on and asked 
what your flesh and blood and bones were made of; 
what would you say then ? I know what my brother the 
doctor would say; he would reply, 

“Cells! Living cells!” 

And you would shake your head and think he was 
joking. Why, a cell is a high-walled, narrow room where 
prisoners are kept—what have stone walls and barred 
windows to do with the make-up of a human body? 
“Living cells,” he said. What is a living cell? 

A living cell is a tiny piece of clear, colorless jelly 
called Protoplasm, so small you cannot possibly see 
it without the help of the man with the microscope. 
In the tiniest drop of your blood some five millions of 
blood-cells are floating—as many as there are people in 
New York! 

You would think that so tiny a form had no room with- 
in itself for anything at all, but let the man with the 


38 


THE STORY OF THE OAK TREE 


microscope put one on a glass slide under his lense, 
where it will appear about two hundred thousand times 
as big as it really is. Here is a picture of it. 

All around the edge we see a clear 
line. This is the outer covering of the 
cell, a kind of skin called the cell-wall 
which keeps it separate from its neigh- 
'“protopiasm 11 ’ bor cells. Inside that we see the pro- 

and Nucleus 

toplasm, colorless as white of egg, 
and somewhere in this is a smaller round or oval 
speck which is the most important part of the cell; this 
speck is called the Nucleus. 

Now, a beautiful and splendidly moving animal such 
as man, with a brain and five senses, is composed of 
enormous numbers of cells. A butterfly has not so many, 
and a jelly fish has fewer still. Swimming about in the 
water, so small you cannot see them without our friend 
and his microscope, live animals made of only one cell! 
You can just imagine how small they are, and how 
simply made. Such a one is the ameba, humblest of all 
living creatures. The ameba has no arms and no legs, 
no head and no tail, no eyes and no mouth, no brain and 
no desires; it is naked, nothing but a nucleus surrounded 
by a bit of jelly; yet it is able to find food and eat, it 
moves by stretching itself out and streaming along, and, 
most marvelous of all, it is able to feel and respond to 



WHAT PEOPLE ARE MADE OE 


39 


certain changes in its surroundings. Put it on a glass 
slide, then tap the slide sharply, and through the micro¬ 
scope you can see the ameba draw itself up still smaller; 
bring close to it certain chemicals, and it will come to 
them or shrink away; strong heat or light will damage it, 
and electric currents will cause it to move in a particular 
direction. 

Here is a picture of an ameba 
changing shape and flowing around 
food. You can see the cell-wall, 
the protoplasm, and the nucleus. 

The black spot outside the cell is 
a particle of plant which the ameba 
is going to eat. 

See how the ameba goes after 
his dinner! He has no hands to 
reach for it, so he stretches out a 
piece of himself and touches the 
particle of plant. If it were a 

Stone, Or Something he COUld not How Ameba Goes After 

His Dinner 

eat, he would shrink away from 

it immediately, but somehow this plant seems tasty to 
him, so he puts out another piece of himself and draws 
the food right into the protoplasm of his body. He di¬ 
gests as much of it as he wants, and then that clear 
space you see inside the protoplasm busies itself in pump- 








40 


story or the oak tree 


ing out the waste that is left. You can tell it is pumping 
because it gets larger and smaller and larger and smaller. 

The ameba is not the only one-celled form. Every 
drop of sea water contains millions of such humble crea¬ 
tures; some of them swim along by means of tiny threads 
which extend out beyond their bodies like the legs of a 
centipede. They are sea-dust, they are diatom, and sea- 
dust and diatom serve as food for sea worms. Then 
the whelk eats the worms, the codfish eats the whelk, 
and you and I eat the codfish! It sounds like a game, 
and perhaps it is—Nature’s great and fierce and splendid 
game called the Struggle for Existence. Catch-as-catch- 
can! Aren’t you glad you are not an ameba ? 

You can readily see why cells are not all the same kind 
or the same shape. Your hand is not the same shape as 
your foot, because it has not the same work to do. If 
all the cells in your body were the same shape and did 



the same work, you would 
d be nothing but a glorified 
® ameba! No indeed, your 
(I) cells are of many, many 
V.) different shapes and 
forms. You have gland 
// cells, muscle cells, and 
y) nerve cells; cells for grow¬ 
ing, moving, and knowing; 









WHAT pejopte; are; made; of 41 

and all these different shaped and differently acting cells 
are connected one with another so that they may work 
together to make up your living body. 

Look at the picture. It is the presence of thousands 
of cells like Number 1 which enables you to smell. Num¬ 
ber 2 is the tiny cell from which a mouse finally grows, 
and Number 3 is the cell from which a bird finally grows. 

Here is the way Mr. Julian Huxley describes the team¬ 
work of the cells—I have changed a few of his words: 

“A human body is a huge cell-state, with a cell-popula¬ 
tion thousands of times larger than the total human 
population of the world. A single act of thought means 
the teamwork of a vast multitude of brain-cells, a single 
movement of a limb sets to work thousands of muscle- 
cells, a single beat of the heart sends billions of blood- 
cells whirling down the dark pipes we call blood-vessels. 
Each of these cells is a unit of life, to be compared to a 
single free-living cell, such as the ameba.” 

When we speak of living tissue, we mean a great mass 
of these connected cells; a strip of flesh is tissue, the 
cambium of your oak tree is tissue. 

What does the robin do when the time comes for her 
to multiply, when the time comes for her to make four 
of herself, instead of one? She lays eggs, and the 
shells burst, and out of each pretty blue shell comes a 
baby robin which very soon grows into a mother robin or 


42 


the: STORY OR THE) OAK TRE)E) 


a father robin, which in its turn raises a robin family. 
But what does the cell do when the time comes for it to 
multiply? The cell, working by itself, cannot lay an egg; 
it is nothing but a tiny, limbless piece of jelly. Its form 
is too simple to attempt a task so difficult as building an 
egg within itself; its form is so simple that there is only 
one possible way for it to multiply. 

It just divides itself in two! 

The man with the microscope can tell you all about this. 
Time after time, he has sat there and watched the cell 
divide. He has seen one cell become two, and those two 
become four, and those four eight, and so on into 
hundreds of thousands. And very thrilling it is to watch, 
he will tell you! Certain changes take place in the cell, 
changes that he is familiar with, and which tell him what 
is going to happen—the cell is about 
to divide! 

Here is a picture of the ameba 
dividing. It was drawn by a lady 
cell-student, and this is what she says 
about it. “First of all the nucleus 
(that is the more solid part on the 
middle) becomes the shape of the 
figure 8 its waist gets thinner and 
thinner, and soon it divides in two. After that the 


mmm 






WHAT PEOPLE ARE MADE OE 


43 


rest of the protoplasm also divides, half going round one 
piece of the nucleus, and half round the other.” 

Tiny one-celled creatures like those that make up the 
sea-dust multiply almost too rapidly for our imagina¬ 
tion to follow. One of them may become a million in a 
week, and a quarter million can lie in a gallon of water. 
In one square yard of lake water there may be, at the 
height of the breeding season, 7,000 million of them. 
Perhaps it is just as well that the next largest creatures 
devour them before they become so many as to choke up 
the lakes and rivers and seas! 

A hundred years ago, when now and again people dis¬ 
covered a new cell, different from all cells they had ever 
seen, they used to think that this cell came into being all 
by itself, that it was its own father and mother and 
grandfather and grandmother. In those days, micro¬ 
scope makers had not learned to make fine lenses such as 
we have to-day, and it takes a very powerful lense to 
find out the truth! So men thought a new cell could 
appear right out of the air, without having any par¬ 
ents at all. Patient men had to spend their lives look¬ 
ing into the microscope to prove that this is not so. No 
cell appears by itself; every cell was once a part of some 
other cell, and became an independent cell only when the 
parent cell divided. An animal is just a great big col¬ 
lection of cells, and you never heard of an animal ap- 

4 


44 


the: story of the: oak trFF 


pearing out of the clear sky! Every animal is born 
from a parent animal, every plant from a parent plant, 
every child from its mother, just as every cell comes 
from another cell. 

You understand, now, how important the cell is. You 
understand, too, how each of your natural acts—when 
you breathe, or digest food, or give off waste, or move, 
or grow—each of these acts, which is shared by all living 
things, is just your cells expressing themselves in team¬ 
work. Each cell, each mass of cells, is doing the work 
for which it is fitted. 

Each special cell has its own special work, yet there is 
one thing they all do, one task they are all busy per¬ 
forming day and night, in Springtime and in Wintertime. 
Just as surely as you breathe, so surely do the cells of 
your body build up and break down, build up and break 
down, build up and break down. They absorb food, or 
water, or air, depending upon what kind of cells they are; 
they change this food or water or air into something more 
useful to them, and then they get rid of what is left. 
They build up and break down, they take in and get rid 
of, they absorb and give off. I have said it three ways— 
there are other ways to express it; try if you can think 

of one; try to say it in your own words.But 

whatever way we describe it, this building up and break¬ 
ing down, this breaking down and renewing, is called 



WHAT PEOPLE ARE MADE OP 


45 


Metabolism. And that one word stands for such an 
important process, such an age-old and meaningful duty 
performed by the living cell, that I am going to ask you 
to say it over five times: Metabolism, metabolism, meta¬ 
bolism, metabolism, metabolism! 


CHAPTER VI 


What Plants are Made of 

There is no rhyme which asks what trees are made of. 
Suppose we make one for ourselves: 

What is the green tree made of, made of? 

You know very well, in the tree lives the cell ; 

Cells are what trees are made of, made of! 

Yes, trees are made of living cells, just as all other 
plants are, and just as animals are. Do you remember 
what we called the jelly-like stuff of which the cell is 
made? Not such a hard word: Protoplasm. Open 
your eyes and ears now, for I am going to tell you some¬ 
thing wonderful. 

Plant protoplasm and animal protoplasm are one and 
the same! 

All living things come from the same beginning. Has 
your mother not read to you from the Bible how 

“All flesh is grass.” 

I never knew what that meant until I learned about 
protoplasm, and found that animal protoplasm and plant 
protoplasm are one and the same. To me, this is a very 
friendly and comforting thing, this thought that all the 
birds and beasts and flowers and trees began their lives 
as I began mine. Walking through the fields on some 
early morning in Spring, have you not had a wild, shy 


WHAT PL,ANTS ARE ) MADE) OP 


4 7 


feeling which told you that you were part of this wide, 
sweet out-of-doors? Have you not felt as though the 
leafy bramble before you, the grass under your feet, the 
thrush singing overhead, were friends of yours, and you 
understood them, and they you ? At such times you have 
not dared, I think, to pluck so much as one yellow butter¬ 
cup, for fear of hurting something that is part of you. 

And now you know that it is part of you, that we are 
all one big family, animals and plants and people, because 
we come from the same beginning, the same protoplasm. 
Of course, it does not do to make too much of this bond 
between the animals and the plants; in no sense are the 
plants related to you as you are related to your aunt or 
your cousin. It is only in the beginning, the very earliest 
beginning, before the protoplasm has grown or developed 
or divided, that plant protoplasm is the same as animal 
protoplasm. The instant it begins to grow, it takes on 
special features which mark it for a plant or an animal. 
Give a cell from a rose leaf and a cell from your skin to 
the man with the microscope, and he can tell at a glance 
which is which. That is because they are grown-up cells, 
cleverly fashioned and adapted for their own special 
kinds of work. There is one sign which always betrays 
a green plant cell—chlorophyll, that magic green fluid 
which absorbs the sunlight. Not one animal in the world 


48 


THE STORY OF THE OAK TREE 


can boast chlorophyll as part of its armor to fight its 
way through life. 

But the man with the microscope can dip from sea 
water tiny one-celled creatures which he cannot call 
either plants or animals, because they are as much one as 
the other. To the animal kingdom and the plant king¬ 
dom belong wee free-swimming creatures, mere pieces 
of protoplasm without a cell-wall, from which whole 
families of creatures can be traced in both directions— 
into the animal kingdom and into the plant kingdom. 

At the outset, then, our 
friend the oak tree is 
the same as any simple, 
less bulky plant—the same 
as a violet, for instance. 
Each commences life as 
a tiny, naked protoplast 
(this means a piece of 
protoplasm) cuddled away 
inside the parent flower. 
When the time is ripe, 
the oak tree cell puts on 
its protective skin, the 
cell-wall. Very soon the cell divides, and the single cell 
gives rise to a chain of cells and this in turn to a cell- 



Dry Empty Wood Cells, 
Without Nuclei 


The pith of our oak tree is made up 
of just such cells as these. You can 
see why the first man with the micro¬ 
scope called them “cells;” they are 
fitted together just like the cells of 
a honeycomb. 











WHAT PLANTS ARE) MADE) OF 


49 


mass. At first, all the members of this cell-mass are 
alike, and all do the same work, but as the tree grows 
larger there is more work to be done, and so the dif¬ 
ferent cell-masses prepare themselves to perform their 
several duties. Some are set apart for the drinking in of 
water from the soil; others act as a line of messengers 
to pass the water up the tree for the nourishment of cell- 
masses which lie too far from the soil to gather their own 
water. These messenger cells lie all along up the tree 
trunk, and they are connected one with another by means 
of fine threads of protoplasm. Through these threads 
the sap runs from cell to cell. Still other cell-masses, 
like those which make up the heartwood and bark, exist 
only to give bulk and protection to the tree so that it 
may withstand wind and weather. In the leaf, as you 
know, are the leaf-cells which contain that magic green 
fluid, chlorophyll, which uses sun-light to turn air and 
water into plant food. 

And always these cells are building up and breaking 
down, wearing out and renewing themselves—what did 
we call this process? A big word, but a short while ago 
you said it over five times: metabolism. This continues 
as long as there is life and growth in the tree, which is a 
long time, because even the oldest tree puts forth new 
buds and shoots. 


50 


THE STORY OR THE OAK TREE 


The cells, then, do all the work of the tree. So that the 
most sensible way to study a tree is not to start with root, 
trunk and branches, but to commence with the cells, 
to examine each cell-mass and find out how its members 
do their work. It is only recently that we have learned 
this best way to study the tree. Formerly, people fol¬ 
lowed the most natural way, they studied first of all those 
parts of the tree that looked biggest and most important, 
the trunk, roots, and branches. It took the man with the 
microscope to set us straight! He showed us that trunk, 
roots and branches grow and take shape solely to serve 
the needs of the tiny cells; he showed us that the well¬ 
being of the cells means the health of the tree, and the 
multiplying of the cells means the growth of the tree. 
He made us turn our eyes from the bulky trunk to the 
twigs and leaves, to the root-ends and the tiny root-hairs. 
These delicate members, he said, are the liveliest parts of 
the tree; do not think of them as separate forms, but 
realize that they are just the trunk and branches length¬ 
ened out in such shapes that they can bring the living 
cells closer to the moisture of the earth, closer to the 
glow of the sunlight. Feeling for moisture is a dainty 
business, the clumsy, hard-skinned trunk could not do 
that; its bark is so thick it could not feel the water, and 
if it could, the water would not soak in. So the trunk 


WHAT PLANTS ARE) MADE) OF 


51 


twists itself into roots, and the roots taper out to sen¬ 
sitive ends with delicate root-hairs growing along their 
sides. It needs a tender surface to drink in the sun¬ 
light; the gnarled, sturdy branches could not do this, 
so they learned to narrow their ends into slender twigs, 
and the twigs shaped themselves into leaves, flat and 
thin as paper and green with the sun-drinking fluid they 
contain. 

And all this shaping and changing and twisting has just 
one aim in view; the welfare of the cells. Now you no 
longer wonder why the man with the microscope told us 
that if we wanted to know the tree we must, 

“Study the cell!” 


CHAPTER VII 


The Meaning of the Flower 

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance;—and there 
is pansies, that’s for thoughts.” 

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5. 

The earliest nations had a flower language; they left 
traces of it in the flower-writing and flower symbols on 
the tombs and monuments of ancient Egypt and Assyria. 
We can only dimly guess at the meaning of these flower 
drawings, but we can understand the flower symbols of 
another people, the Greeks, who were so passionately 
fond of flowers that they turned naturally to them when¬ 
ever they had some deep feeling to express. In the soft 
airs of that ancient country, lovers hung the doorways of 
their sweethearts’ homes with garlands; when someone 
inside the house was ill, their friends knew of it by the 
blackthorn and laurel which lay across the lintel. In 
fetes and festivals the young men crowned themselves 
with flowers; blossoms brightened the city gates in times 
of rejoicing. 

Perhaps you have eaten Thanksgiving dinner at your 
uncle’s house, or watched the Christmas turkey carved 
at your grandfather’s table; when the plum pudding came 
on and the cider was passed, you would have been sur- 


THE MEANING OE THE EEOWER 


53 


prised, no doubt, if your father and uncle and grand¬ 
father had placed wreaths of roses on their heads! Yet 
that is what the fathers and grandfathers of Greek boys 
and girls did when they feasted in the homes of their 
friends, and everybody thought it a very pleasant cus¬ 
tom. In the Grecian games, too, the winning athletes 
were crowned with laurel leaves; those were proud moth¬ 
ers who saw their strong sons, wrestlers, runners, throw¬ 
ers, come forward and bend their heads to receive the 
victor’s wreath. 

Oak leaves were twined to weave the patriot’s crown, 
bay leaves for the poet, and myrtle was the crown of 
beauty. The highest honor for which a Roman soldier 
longed was the civic crown of oak leaves, because it 
proved to all men that he had braved death in the ser¬ 
vice of his country. 

Every nation has its favorite flower; India has her 
lotus, Japan her chrysanthemum. The Hindus believe 
that their God, Brahma, was born a tiny baby in the 
bosom of a lotus, and so they hold the lotus sacred. The 
Parsians celebrate every year a “feast of roses,” lasting 
as long as the roses bloom. You know the flower of 
France, do you not, the fleur-de-lis? When Napoleon 
was emperor, he ripped the lilies from the royal robes 
and in their stead caused golden bees to be embroidered, 
but when Napoleon’s majesty had passed, the fleur-de-lis 


54 


THU STORY OR THU OAK TRUU 


found its way back upon the royal robes and upon the 
shield of France. 

More than a hundred years ago, when the city of Berlin 
was filled with Napoleon’s victorious soldiers, Louise, 
mother of the German Emperor William I, was forced 
to take refuge with her family on the outskirts of the 
city. When the children of the city cried because they 
were hungry and had no shoes to cover their feet, the 
Queen-mother, to comfort them, gave them garlands 
woven from cornflowers which she had gathered by the 
wayside. Since that time the cornflower has been Ger¬ 
many’s favorite. 

In your history books you have read about the Wars 
of the Roses, fought between the English lords of Lan¬ 
caster and of York. The family of Lancaster wore the 
red rose, their enemies, the white rose. Not until a 
daughter of York married a son of Lancaster did the 
terrible feud end, and then England took for its flower 
the Tudor Rose. 

Perhaps you know the story of the shamrock. One 
day when Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, stood 
preaching out-of-doors, he could not make the simple 
country folk understand the meaning of the Trinity. 
They frowned and asked, 

“How can there be three Gods, and yet one God ?” 


the) meaning of the) ffowe)r 


55 


The Saint gazed about him in perplexity; he looked up, 
and he looked down. Then, stooping, he plucked a sham¬ 
rock growing at his feet and held it up before the people. 

Do you not see,” said he, “in this wild flower, how 
three leaves are united on one stalk, and will you not 
then believe what I tell you, that there are indeed three 
persons and yet one God?” 

The people understood, and from that time the Sham¬ 
rock has been the national flower of Ireland. 

A thousand years ago, when a gentleman had no busi¬ 
ness but to fight, the Danes came down from the north 
to conquer Scotland. On the eastern-most point of that 
country stood a strong castle, walled and moated. One 
dark night, when the Danes had made all ready, they 
took off their shoes and crept stealthily upon this castle, 
expecting to swim across the moat. Suddenly the air re¬ 
sounded with cries of rage and distress; not a man but 
longed for water,—the dry moat was filled with thistles! 
Inside the castle the men-at-arms were roused, and 
Scotland was saved. Out of gratitude for their escape, 
the Scots adopted the thistle as their national emblem. 

Every loyal Welshman wears a leek in his cap upon 
Saint David’s Day. In the year 640, on Saint David’s 
Day, the Welsh were about to march against an English 
army. In those times, every army did not have its own 
specially designed uniform, as it has now, so to dis- 


56 the: story or the oak tree 

tinguish themselves from the enemy the soldiers wore 
such badges as they could obtain, As they marched 
through a field, every Welshman plucked a leek and 
stuck it in his cap. The Welsh won the battle, and in 
grateful memory of the victory they kept the leek as 
their national flower. 

On the Mexican shield is pictured an eagle perched 
upon a cactus stem. After the Aztecs had wandered 
many years they met a wise man, who told them, 

“Where you find an eagle perched upon a rock, there 
shall you build your city.” 

As they drew near Lake Tezcuco, they spied an eagle 
perched upon a cactus branch which grew upon a rock. 
They rejoiced, because they were tired of roving, and 
there they stayed and built their city, which they called 
by a name meaning cactus-on-a-stem. 

Our own country has no national flower, but almost 
every state has its favorite. Maine has the pine cone 
and tassel, Nebraska the goldenrod, Kansas the sun¬ 
flower, California the poppy. Many states have asked 
their school children to select a flower for them. Which 
flower would you choose for your state? 

The rose has always been the queen of flowers. To 
the ancients it was the emblem of silence, love and joy. 
At great feasts they would hang a rose over the table 
to remind the guests that the talk must not grow too 


THE) MEANING OF THE EEOWER 


57 


loud; it must be “sub rosa,” meaning “under the rose.” 
In the language of flowers, a single rose means, “I love 
you.” The wallflower stands for love faithful in spite 
of adversity, the daffodil for unrequited love, the dande¬ 
lion for coquetry, the honeysuckle for devotion, the gold- 
enrod for encouragement, the forget-me-not for true 
love. So well do the eastern nations understand the 
language of flowers that a Persian girl, receiving a 
bouquet of blossoms, would have no need of words from 
her lover. If she found there a snowdrop, she would 
know that she had a friend in need, a hyacinth would 
betoken that her lover was sorrowful. Perhaps she 
would return to him a moss-rose bud, her confession of 
love. 

Good luck follows the finder of a four leaf clover, 
good fortune comes to him who spies white heather. 
Eilies for Easter time, holly and mistletoe for Christmas, 
orange blossoms for the bride—how closely flowers are 
woven into the happiest days of our life! 

All these things, and more, the flower means to us; 
now let us see what the flower means to the plant. 

What do you do when you want to plant a tree You 
plant a seed! And where does the seed come from? 
The fruit of the tree, be it juicy apple or hard, dry 
acorn. And what makes the fruit ? The flower! So it 
is the flower that plays the part of reproduction, and re- 


58 


the: story or the: oak tre:e: 


production, in Nature, means reproducing or creating 
others like yourself, whether you be a tree or a stalk of 
wheat or an Easter lily. 

In the last chapter, on cells, we asked, 

“What does the cell do when the time comes for it to 
multiply ?” 

The answer was, 

“It divides in two ” 

But we left another question unasked, 

“How does the cell know when the time has come for 
it to multiply? 

The ameba knows because it is getting too big; its 
growth is inconvenient to its simple structure, and it 
must check growth by splitting in two. In one-celled 
creatures like the ameba, division always makes two 
creatures where there has been one, but in a many-celled 
form like the flower, cell-division does not make two 
flowers, it just makes more cells for the one flower so 
it can grow bigger and brighter. The flower is higher 
in the scale of life than the ameba, it is composed of 
thousands of cells, and because it is so formed, a special 
thing has to happen before it can give birth to a new 
flower. Indeed, this special thing has to happen to a rose 
or a lion or a pussycat or a human being before they 
can make two of themselves. Before it can divide the 


THE MEANING OE THE EEOWER 


59 


cell must be touched and wakened by another cell, and for 
flowers this other cell is contained in the pollen of another 
flower of its own kind. And so: 

The flower cell knows its time has come when the 
pollen touches it. 

Tet us examine a buttercup, and see how the whole 
flower is designed for this business of pollen shedding 
and pollen receiving, this business called pollination. 

On the outside are five or 
more green scales, like leaves. 

They form the calyx, which pro¬ 
tects the fragile inner parts of 
the bud, and, as the bud opens, 
steadies the flower. Next come 

Buttercup Cut in Half 

the bright yellow^ petals of the 

corolla, and inside the corolla are the pollen-bearing 
stamens. In each stamen the pollen is held in a sac at 
the end of a stalk; the sac is called the head, or anther. 
In the center of the flower are many small green grains, 
the carpels, and in each carpel is an ovule containing 
an egg-cell. The part of the carpels containing the ovule 
is called the ovary, or seed-vessel, because it is the ovules 
which will one day, when the pollen reaches them, become 
seeds. 

It is puzzling, after one has learned from a buttercup 
the four parts of the flower,—calyx, corolla, stamens 



5 


6o 


the: story or the: oak tre:e: 


and carpels, to try to find them in other flowers. In 
many flowers, two parts will be combined, so that you can 








THE MEANING OE THE EEOWER 


6l 


find only three of the sections. In the Easter lily, for 
instance, the green calyx of the bud becomes the waxy 
white corolla of the flower. The carpels are united to 
form one long pistil; you can see it thrusting itself out 
beyond the yellow stamens. Many flowers, again, do not 
possess both pistil and stamens; in this case the flowers 
may grow in pairs, as the flowers of the oak. The male 
or pollen-bearing flower containing the stamens is called 
the staminate flower, the female or pollen-receiving 
flower containing the pistil is the pistillate flower. 



Staminate Flower Pistillate Flower 


There they hang from the bough, mother and father 
catkins of the oak, side by side, waving gently in the 
breeze. The pollen-bearing flowers droop like so many 
beads on a string, several strings hanging from the same 
point, fringe-like; all flowers which grow like that are 
called “catkins.” The mother flowers, the pistillates, hide 
shyly up under the axils of the leaves, just where you 


62 


THE STORY OR THE OAK TREE 


will find the acorn when the flower is gone. It is early 
Spring, the foliage leaves have just unfolded, in the 
staminate flower the pollen is ripe. A puff of wind 
shakes loose the pollen grains, they are blown against the 
pistillate flowers, the sticky surface of the pistil catches 
them, and the business of pollination is under way. 

When the cell in the pollen meets the egg-cell in the 
pistil, Nature knows that one important piece of busi¬ 
ness is done. The egg-cell is fertilized, and right away 
it begins to grow and divide. It has in it, now, the 
character of both its parents; let us see what it will be¬ 
come. 

At first it is nourished by food stored in the embryo- 
sac, food something like white of egg. The embryo 
develops into the seed; the bright petals of the corolla, 
no longer needed now, wither away; when the seed is 
ripe growth stops, the young tissues dry up and your 
acorn is cast loose from the parent tree. The reason the 
young tissues dry up is so that the acorn may rest with¬ 
out food until it is planted and can gather food for it¬ 
self. 

Now you understand what Mr. J. Arthur Thomson 
meant when he said, 

“Trace an oak tree to a sapling, to a seedling, to a seed 
and an ovule, and we come to a fertilized egg-cell, the 
beginning of individual life.” 


CHAPTER VIII 

The Bee and the Flower 

Hidden in the pistil, the egg-cell waits for the sperm¬ 
cell in the pollen of another flower, to come and wake 
it into growth. 

On the oak branch, 
as we have seen, the 
pistils and stamens 
grow in separate 
flowers, no one 
flower containing both 
male and female 
cells. But with most 
garden flowers this 
is not the case. Al¬ 
most every flower which you admire holds in its bright 
corolla both pistil and stamens. It is so with the butter¬ 
cup and with the rose, with the poppy and with the mig¬ 
nonette. 

Why is it, when the rose contains both egg-cell and 
sperm-cell, both pistils and stamens, that the egg-cell 
must wait for the pollen of another flower? Why does 
not the pollen from its own stamen-heads fall upon the 
pistil and go about its business of joining with the egg¬ 
cell? In other words, why does not the flower fertilize 
itself ? 



6 4 


the: story OR the: oak tre:e 


Because, as Charles Darwin said—and he was the 
greatest nature student of them all—, 

“Nature hates self-fertilization.” 

Has your father a garden ? Then he can tell you how 
cross-fertilizing with fresh stock makes his flowers 
stronger and prettier. Perhaps he has given you a 
flower bed all your own, to dig and cultivate for yourself. 
Suppose you plant in your bed two red rose bushes, side 
by side. Then suppose you arrange things so that the 
flowers of one of these bushes receive no pollen but their 
own, whereas the roses on the other bush receive pollen 
from a third bush. The first June, both bushes will bear 
like flowers, perhaps they will flourish equally well for 
several generations (a generation for a rose bush means 
a year), but in the end the self-fertilized bush will be¬ 
come sickly and weak and will be crowded to death by 
the fresh strength of the cross-fertilized bush. 

Because Nature knows the dangers of self-fertilization, 
she takes measures to prevent it. In a flower contain¬ 
ing both pistil and stamens she does not allow pistil 
and stamens to ripen at the same time, she sees to it that 
the pollen ripens and is carried away before the pistil 
is ready to receive it. The latter, then, must wait for 
the pollen from some other flower. Or, when pistil and 
stamens are bound to ripen at the same time, Nature 
twists the stamens out of reach of the pistil. In both 


THE BEE AND THE FEOWER 


65 


cases, you see, Nature gets what she is after; cross-fer¬ 
tilization. 

Of course, self-fertilization is better than none. Know¬ 
ing this, Nature has devised means for self-fertilization 
in case something interferes to stop cross-fertilization. 
Violets, for instance, have some late buds which never 
open, but pollinize themselves inside the bud. Flowers 
which grow in the water and cannot reach the surface, 
like the water buttercup, are forced to self-fertilization. 
There are many examples of flowers which pollinize 
themselves successfully, but for the most part, Nature 
gives her children the benefit of inheritance from fresh 
stock. 

You know what “inheritance” means, do you not? 
Perhaps you have blue eyes, but you think brown eyes 
prettier. Then you had better marry a brown-eyed girl 
when you grow up, so that your children may have a 
chance to inherit her brown eyes. Or perhaps you have 
red hair and freckles, and there hangs on your dining 
room wall at home an old portrait of a young lady with 
red hair and freckles—of course the artist did not put in 
the freckles, but you have good reasons to know they 
were there. 

“Yes,” you have heard your mother say, “Mary in¬ 
herits her red hair from Great-grandmother Babcock!” 


66 


THE STORY OE THE OAK TREE 


To inherit means to receive by nature from one's an¬ 
cestors. If you want to get that red hair out of your 
family—which I think would be a mistake, because red 
hair is beautiful—you must be sure to marry a black 
haired gentleman, like Mr. Mantilini in Dicken’s story 
of “Nicholas Nickleby.” 

Sometimes these family traits are so stubborn they 
will not be subdued, but crop out at the most unex¬ 
pected times after skipping a generation or two. Per¬ 
haps you have seen pictures of the Spanish kings, Philip 
Second, Third and Fourth. Because they were kings, 
and rich, artists were eager to paint their portraits. A 
wonderfully skillful artist named Velasquez, a Spaniard, 
painted Philip the Fourth’s portrait forty times! And 
yet, if Philip had not been a king, I doubt if Velasquez 
could have been bribed to paint him, because he was so 
homely. He had a long nose and a still longer chin, 
and his ugly thick under-lip protruded in a perpetual 
pout. Poor Philip the Fourth! He couldn’t help that 
heavy lip, he came by it naturally from his Austrian 
forebears, the Hapsburgs, and in the Hapsburg family 
that lip was so persistent in its reappearance that it is 
still known as the “Hapsburg lip.” 

There are some very queer kinks in this business of 
inheritance and cross-fertiliation. Things don’t always 
work out the way they are expected to. For instance, if 


THE BEE and The EEOWER 


67 


you cross-breed a black bull with a red cow you will not 
get a roan or mixed calf, but a black one like its father. 
Certain colors, such as black and white, seem to be more 
persistent, more powerful than other colors; these colors 
are said to be “dominant” over the others. On the other 
hand, animal and plant breeders can often take two very 
unlike parents and obtain offspring which are perfect 
blends of their parents. In crosses between long-eared 
rabbits and short-eared rabbits, a learned professor found 
that the baby rabbit’s ears were neither long nor short, 
but halfway between. Many plant hybrids (children of 
parents of different plants) are very exact blends of 
their parents. The natural color of a wild rabbit is grey. 
If the breeder crosses two tame rabbits, a black father 
rabbit and a white mother rabbit, he will soon have a 
little baby rabbit the color of its faraway wild grey an¬ 
cestor. Living creatures will always return to their 
wild state if they have a chance, and this baby rabbit had 
a chance because black and white contain all the pig¬ 
ments necessary to make up the color grey. 

It is the nucleus of the cell that carries red hair or 
lop-ears or white fur or long chins from generation to 
generation. When the sperm-cell of the black rabbit met 
the egg-cell of the white rabbit, it was decided then and 
there what color fur the baby rabbit would have. When 
after fertilization the egg-cell grows and divides, the 


68 


THE) STORY OR THE OAK TREE 


nucleus grows and divides too, so that every cell in your 
body, muscle cell, brain cell, eye cell, hair cell, has in it, 
in a sense, a bit of the original egg-cell from which you 
came. It will set your imagination spinning to realize 
that everything you now are comes, with the aid of nur¬ 
ture, from that one first tiny bit of protoplasm. 

The story of inheritance and cross-fertilization is so 
fascinating and so useful to mankind that men have spent 
their lives at it. Out in California our own countryman, 
Luther Burbank, has acres upon acres of flowers and 
vegetables and fruits, all new varieties which he has 
created by careful crossing and hybridizing. He has 
grown beautiful plums and berries, bigger and juicier 
than any plums and berries ever tasted before, and he has 
done this by carefully selecting and cross-breeding or 
hybridizing those fruits which he knew would have 
healthy children. He took a dewberry and a raspberry 
and crossed them, and next season, up came a new berry 
—he called it “Primus”—which ripens before most black¬ 
berries and raspberries even commence to bloom. He 
laid the pollen from a staminate blackberry upon the 
pistil of a Crystal White berry and after patient waiting 
he found upon the bush the most beautiful snow-white 
berries, so clear that he could count the small seeds with¬ 
in them. These he called “Iceberg” berries. He grew 
seedless prunes and fragrant pansies—you know most 


THE BEE AND The EEOWER 


69 


pansies have no scent at all—he grew deep-colored roses, 
great enormous daisies, double clematis, wide petaled 
poppies, and a host of lilies never seen before. 

“Can my thoughts be imagined,” wrote Burbank, “after 
many years of patient care and labor (he had been work¬ 
ing over sixteen years) as, walking among my new 
lilies on a dewy morning, I look upon these new forms of 
beauty, on which other eyes have never gazed? Here 
is a plant six feet high, with yellow flowers, beside it 
one only six inches high with dark red flowers, and fur¬ 
ther on one of pale straw, or snowy white, or with curi¬ 
ous dots and shadings; some deliciously fragrant, others 
partly so; some with upright, others with nodding flow¬ 
ers; some with dark green, woolly leaves in whorls, or 
with polished light green, lance-like, scattered leaves.” 

Burbank strolls along his garden walk, pausing here 
and there to enjoy the fragrance of some lovely blossom. 
At the turn of the path he comes upon a clump of Sweet 
William raising their modest heads alongside the tall, 
graceful stems of a bed of white carnations. 

“What a rare combination that would be,” thinks Mr. 
Burbank, “Carnations and Sweet William! I believe I’ll 
try it!” 

So from the Sweet William he cuts away the stamens 
before the pollen is ripe enough to fall, and he ties up the 
flower in a paper bag so that no other pollen can reach 


70 


THE STORY OF THE OAK TREE 


it. When the pistil is ripe he takes off the bag and places 
upon the pistil pollen from his carnation. After which 
he shuts the flower up again in its bag until the seed 
begins to form, and there he has the seed for a new 
flower! 

That is the way Luther Burbank does it. 

Now let us see how Nature does it, let us see what 
messengers Nature uses to carry the pollen from flower 
to flower, and so effect cross-fertilization. 

She uses the wind, and she uses insects. 

She uses bees—bumble bees and honey bees—wasps, 
and flies, and beetles. She uses insects that crawl and 
insects that fly, snail and moth, ant and butterfly, the 
homely slug and the gorgeous humming-bird. All these 
insects, and countless others, visit flowers in order to eat 
the pollen or the honey they 
find there. The bee lights 
upon the violet petal and 
pushes his trunk down the 
nectar pounch to taste the 
honey; as he does so he gets 
his back dusted with pollen 

Bee Rifling Flower from ^ stamens above. He 

flies away, and on entering another violet he rubs the 
fine yellow grains off upon the pistil which opens to re¬ 
ceive them, and the flower is pollinated. Or, hovering 



the be;e; and the fbowe;r 


7 1 


over a buttercup, preparing to rifle the nectary at the 
base of each golden petal, the pollen catches on his feet 
and he wipes it off upon the pistil of the next flower, just 
as your little brother, when he forgets himself, wipes 
the mud from his boots onto the parlor rug! 

Pollen is the only food for bees, wasps, flies, beetles, 
moths and butterflies, so you can see what a happy ar¬ 
rangement Nature has made; the insects are fed, the 
flowers are cross-pollinated. 

Eagerly the flowers await their insect visitors. See 
how dainty Miss Poppy puts on her very prettiest dress 
to attract her butterfly friend! How sweet the fragrance 
of the rose as, laying back her glowing petals she offers 
her pollen to the bumble bee! Brilliant color draws the 
insects; that is why the corolla flames scarlet, blue or 
yellow. Naturalists have differed as to which has the 
stronger attraction, bright color of the corolla or sweet 
scent of the nectar. Darwin thought it was the color, 
so to make sure he stripped the bright petals from his 
flowers, and no insects approached them. But Plateau, 
a Belgian naturalist, was not satisfied with this proof. 
He said to himself, 

“Mr. Darwin was careless when he took the petals 
from his flowers, he handled them roughly and injured 
them,—that is why the bees would not come. Now I 
will strip the petals very, very tenderly from my brightest, 


72 


THE STORY OR THE OAK TREE 


showiest flowers, my gay blue larkspur and my purple 
foxglove, and I can wager that the insects will not desert 
my flowers.” 

So Monsieur Plateau did as he had planned, and saw 
the insects come crawling and flying to his shorn flowers; 
indeed, the bees not only sucked the honey, but they 
circled around and above as though the poor naked 
blossoms were flaunting their loveliest dresses. So he 
knew the insects were guided more by the scent of the 
nectar than the color of the corolla. Plateau also noticed 
that some of his gayest flowers were totally avoided by 
insects, but when he placed nectar at the base, insects 
flew to them eagerly. Of course, Plateau did not decide 
from this that color played no part in attracting insects; 
Nature, he knew, never created all those gorgeous petals 
for no other use than beauty; he watched the white 
butterfly light upon the white spirea and the yellow 
butterfly seek out the golden bloom, but he knew that 
the beetles and bugs and flies—which after all do a bigger 
pollinating business than the bees and butterflies—are at¬ 
tracted solely by scent. 

Special gland-cells in the flower produce the nectar, 
and all plants with nectar have an odor, although we 
with our clumsy nostrils blunted by disuse may not be 
able to smell it. Flies, you know, are not very clean 
creatures, they are often attracted by unpleasant odors; 


the: bee and the eeower 


73 


there are dull yellow or brownish flowers which draw 
their insect visitors by giving off the putrid odor of decay. 
Have you white flowers in your garden, such as the 
slender-stemmed tobacco plant? At night these flowers 
glow in the darkness, and their scent steals upon the 
summer air until the white moths flutter to them. On 
Easter day a friend brought to our house a lily with 
seven blossoms; all day we could not catch a trace of 
odor though we pressed our faces close to the great 
waxy petals, but at night the room was filled with fra¬ 
grance, a fragrance so sweet it followed us upstairs when 
we put out the light at bed-time. 

Many flowers expose their pollen only in the brightest 
sunlight; it is at noon of the sunshiniest days that the 
bees buzz loudest. Because the fine working days are far 
too few, the bees must make the most of their time, so 
they go about their pollen gathering in a very business¬ 
like way. Mr. Bee starts on one kind of flower, say 
a honeysuckle blossom; he learns the quickest and 
shortest way to the nectar, and when he has sucked it 
dry he flies to another blossom on the same vine and 
another and another, each time, perhaps, obtaining his 
prize with more ease and swiftness. The flowers, too, 
help to save time; many of them change color and fade 
as soon as fertilized. It is their way of saying to the bees, 


74 


THE STORY OR THE OAK TREE 


“My honey is already gone, so don’t come buzzing 
round wasting your time on me!” 

Often the anthers change color too; the anthers, you 
remember, are the pollen-sacs on the ends of the sta¬ 
mens. Most anthers are yellow, but if you search you 
can find differently tinted ones, red in the peach blos¬ 
som, dark purple in the poppy and the tulip. 


CHAPTER IX 

How Nature Created the First Plants 

Away back in the beginning of the world there were 
no bees nor humming-birds; there were only cockroaches 
and locusts, crawling insects that fed upon dead leaves 
and leafy plants, or swam in the water and lived upon the 
water-bugs. It took Nature millions of years, perhaps, 
to create a plant that could produce honey for the bee, 
and until the pollen flowers came there were no bees, no 
flies nor beetles, no moths, ants nor wasps. 

You see, Nature did not create the rose all in one 
minute; she did not just snap her fingers and say, “Rose, 
come up!”—and the rose bush sprang up shining with 
flowers. Millions of years ago Nature began to create 
the rose bush, and when she began she was not at all 
sure how it was going to turn out. She took what ma¬ 
terials she had and with skillful fingers she shaped a 
simple green planfc which bore no flowers, and so, of 
course, no seeds. The egg-cell and the sperm-cell were 
exposed loosely on the leaves, as they are to-day on 
the humbler plants, such as the ferns and mosses. 
Nature watched this plant for a million years, and she 
was not satisfied with it. She said to herself, 

“H’m, that is a clumsy way for my rose-plant to bear 
little ones; I can think of a better way than that!” 

6 


76 


the: story or the: oak tre:e 


So she put her gentle hands upon the leaves and 
patiently, through hundreds of generations, she twisted 
them and shaped them and colored them until they be¬ 
came—what ? 

Calyx 

Corolla 

Stamens with pollen inside them, and 
Pistils to receive the pollen. 

In all this shaping and changing Nature had one end 
in view, a better scheme for the transfer of pollen, a 
better device for the scattering of seeds. 

Nature’s slow work of transformation, whether we 
speak of plants or animals, of roses or oak trees, is 
called Evolution. Every plant and every animal has 
grown or evolved from some much simpler form, but 
it has taken centuries to accomplish this evolution. 

Plants had leaves before they had flowers, and all 
parts of the flower except the stem are transformed 
leaves. Look at one of those great white peonies grow¬ 
ing by your garden gate, you can easily see where the 
green leaves become bracts of the calyx, and the bracts 
become petals of the corolla. Have you ever seen 
double peonies? The gardener made them that way by 
cross-fertilization; the extra petals are merely trans¬ 
formed stamens. Next summer, as you paddle your 
canoe across the still waters of the pond, pull a white 


HOW NATURE) CREATED THE FIRST PEANTS 77 


water lily, a wide-open one, and you can trace clearly 
the change from stamens to pistil. Indeed, when you 
know all about the flowers you can trace every part, 
from calyx to corolla to stamen and pistil, back to the 
green leaf. Even the anther on the stamen is an un¬ 
folded leaf-blade. 

So, you see, “all parts of the flower have a common 
nature—they are all leaves transformed in various ways 
and combining to fulfil the plant’s chief end—that it 
should produce seeds which will develop into full-grown 
plants and bear next year’s flowers.”—Arthur Thomson. 
All the features which make flowers different one from 
another, color, form, and fragrance, are due to Nature's 
efforts to secure the best possible means for the transfer 
of pollen. 

Because they are wind-pollinated, not insect-pollinated, 
the flowers of the oak are small and modest. The co¬ 
rolla is not formed to attract notice, so it is not vivid 
nor large, if so it would be a hindrance, catching the 
flying pollen and preventing it from reaching the sticky 
surface of the pistil. On most wind flowers the stamens 
hang far out of the corolla on slender threads, “dangling 
in the air, shaken fry every gust.” The pistils, too, pro¬ 
trude ; have you never watched the hazel catkins swinging 
in the breeze, their crimson pistils combing the air for 
drifting pollen? In wind-pollinated plants the flowers 


78 


the; story of the; oak tre;e; 


open early in the Spring, before the foliage leaves grow 
big enough to interfere with the flight of the pollen. 
Wind-borne pollen is light as dust, and Nature has to 
provide plenty of it, for a single grain flying on the 
wind has a very slight chance of finding the pistil of a 
flower of its own kind. In the pine tree Nature has made 
for each pollen grain two little bladders the better to 
float in the air. 

There is wind-borne pollen and there is water-borne 
pollen; the grasswrack of the sea, the weeds in the mill¬ 
pond depend upon the water to carry their pollen from 
plant to plant, and Nature shapes their flowers so that 
wind and water may serve their pollinating purpose 
easily. And all the time our insect-pollinated flowers are 
doing what they can to attract their winged or their 
crawling friends. Have you ever seen a barberry hedge, 
with its red berries nodding their jolly little heads at 
Christmas time? The barberry flowers are so eager for 
cross-fertilization, so afraid the pollen grains will escape 
them, that their stamens spring forward and close over 
anything touching the inside of their base. Where a 
flower has no corolla, the calyx, after the bud has un¬ 
folded, often takes upon itself the form and duties of the 
corolla. It becomes brighter in color, its petals grow 
silky to the touch, like the marsh-marigold and purple 


HOW NATURE CREATED THE ElRST PR ANTS 79 

clematis. If it remained a dark, thick green calyx, fit 
only for protecting the bud, the bees would not fly to it. 

And not only does the flower put on her fine dress and 
sweet perfume to attract the insects, she also does what 
she can to make things comfortable for these visitors 
when they alight. She stiffens her petals to make strong 
landing-stages for the bees; in the lady’s slipper you can 
see how the petal has thickened just where the insect has 
to stand, so also in the orchid, the purple sage, and the 
golden broom. A flower like the hedge-parsley holds its 
nectar in a shallow cup, so that flies and such short- 
tongued insects can easily reach it, and flies wander 
about over the blossoms scattering pollen freely. “But 
in a flower like the sage,” we are told by our old friend 
Mr. Arthur Thomson, “the nectar is hidden at the bot¬ 
tom of the deep corolla tube; it can be reached only by 
long-tongued bees,” and Mr. Bee must enter the flower 
in one particular way. The lower petal forms a landing- 
stage to which Mr. Bee clings; he thrusts his head and 
little chest into the corolla tube. As he pushes against 
the lower ends of the two stamens, the upper ends swing 
down and dust his back with pollen. He buzzes off to 
another sage flower, a somewhat older one this time, 
whose pistil raises its head from the upper petal just far 
enough to get in Mr. Bee’s way and catch the pollen from 
off his back. Such a flower as the sage has all its parts 


8 o 


the: story or the oak tree 


shaped so that nobody can carry its pollen except Mr. 
Bee. If Mrs. Fly attempts to enter in search of nectar 
she soon finds she is not strong enough to push against 
the heavy stamens, and even if she succeeded in getting 
by them, she would be stopped half way down the co¬ 
rolla tube by a fence of stiff hairs which the sage has 
put up on purpose. 

If Nature works over each flower until it has that 
color, scent, and structure which best adapts it for in¬ 
sect visitors, she also works over the insects, that they 
may be better fitted to gather pollen or to suck nectar 
from the blossoms. Flower-visiting flies and beetles have 
long, sharp noses and pointed jaws wonderfully adapted 
for scraping pollen from the anthers of flowers. Grow¬ 
ing out from under his jaw the humble-bee has two long, 
strong spikes with which he can pierce right through 
the petals of such flowers as wisteria, clover or forget- 
me-not, reaching the nectar by short-cut. The honey¬ 
bee, which has shorter spikes, cannot pierce the corolla, 
but must crawl partly into the flower from one side, and 
has a hard time finding the nectar. 

If you want to have strong muscles in your arms, 
what do you do to gain them? You throw your ball, you 
learn to pitch straight and true, you exercise the muscles 
by using them, and the more they are used, the stronger 
they grow. Violin players have strong wrists and fingers, 


HOW NATURE CREATED THE ElRST PRANTS 8l 


laborers who dig all day with a shovel have strong backs 
and shoulders, mountain climbers have legs as hard and 
springy as wire. So with the insects, perhaps the simple 
exercises of probing for honey, of gathering pollen, re¬ 
peated day after day, hour after hour, have developed 
and created bees, certain flies and beetles, and all the 
moths and butterflies. 

How closely, then, the flowers and insects are related! 
If all the bees should die, our porches would soon be bare 
of honeysuckle; without flowers the butterflies would 
starve. Flowers and insects depend one upon another, 
and in their dependence we can see one more strand, the 
strongest strand, of that great web which knits us all 
together—earth and air, soil and water, plant, animal and 
man—Nature's Web of Fife. 


CHAPTER X 

The Web of Life 

In Mr. Arthur Thomson’s big red book, “The Out¬ 
line of Science,” there is a beautiful colored photograph 
of a spider’s web, with old Mrs. Spider squatting in the 
center on the watch for silly Mr. Fly. Old Mrs. Spider 
does not always stay on her web, she often hides in a 



nearby shelter, but she has a signal which tells her when 
she has caught her dinner. A special line runs from the 
web to her den, and when this line shakes she knows the 
web is shaking with the weight of her victim. Like 
the fisherman with a taut line between his fingers, Mrs. 
Spider can tell by the strength of the pull whether her 







THE WEB OE UBE 


83 


catch is a fierce big wasp or a delicious little insect, and 
she knows whether to stay safely where she is or to 
scramble out and seize upon her prey. 

Her web is beautifully planned; it is woven in and out 
and round about upon a scaffolding which she afterwards 
removes; every silken thread is related to every other 
thread, and because of this relationship and this com¬ 
pleteness, Mr. Thomson uses the spider’s web as a sym¬ 
bol of the web of life—woven by Mother Nature in and 
out and round about among her creatures so that nowhere 
a link is missing. 

“No creature lives or dies to 4 *eelf. All are linked to 
other lives, often in unsuspected ways.” The most im¬ 
portant linkage in the world is one of which we have been 
talking, the linkage between flowers and their insect 
visitors. Charles Darwin has a story to tell about this; 
it is called his “cats and clover” story. 

“Round a hundred heads of the purple clover Darwin 
put muslin bags so that air got in and sunlight got in, 
but no insects. From these hundred heads he got not a 
single real seed, while from another hundred heads with¬ 
out muslin bags he obtained 27,000 seeds. These heads 
had been visited by the humble-bee, which effects cross¬ 
fertilization. So the more humble-bees the better next 
year’s clover crop. 


84 


the: story or the oak trrr 


But the nests of the humble-bees are rifled by the 
field-mice, which are fond of the delicate white grubs 
(the children of the humble-bees). Therefore, the more 
field-mice the fewer humble-bees, and the poorer next 
year’s clover crop. 

But in the neighborhood of villages there are fewer 
field-mice than in the open country, for the cats hunt 
them down, killing them though they do not eat them. 
Therefore, the more cats the fewer field-mice, and the 
fewer field-mice the more humble-bees, and the more 
humble-bees the better next year’s clover crop. And so, 
the more clover the richer pasture for the cattle, and the 
more roast beef for John Bull (or Uncle Sam!). The 
more kindly old ladies there are in the village the more 
cats there will be, and this again will favor the clover! 

Thus cats and clover and cattle are linked together.” 

We have seen that besides carrying pollen, birds and 
insects help to scatter the seeds made from the pollen. 
The thrush picks the berries from the mistletoe; he sits 
upon the oak bough to enjoy his feast and when he comes 
to a seed he wipes it neatly from his bill onto the branch. 
As the juice about them dries, the seeds stick fast to the 
branch until next Spring, when they begin to grow just 
where they are! 

The mistletoe, as you know, is a parasite; it cannot 
feed itself and so it lives upon the mother oak. Many 


THE) WE)B OF FIFE) 


85 


plants live thus upon each other, and many animals also. 
In Mr. Thomson’s big red book you can read about the 
habits of these lazy parasite plants and animals, about 
the barnacles that grow in the crab’s shell or the tiny 
pea-crab that lives within the horse-mussel. There is 
the horse-mackerel that sometimes swims about under the 
shelter of a big jellyfish’s umbrella, and there is the 
pilot-fish that swims by the side of the shark. But 
perhaps the most striking partnership of all is that of the 
zic-zac and the crocodile. 



The Zic-Zac and the Crocodile 


The zic-zac is a lively little bird that lives in Egypt 
upon the banks of the broad, green Nile. It has a shrill 



86 


THE STORY OR THE OAK TREE 


voice which carries a long way, and whenever danger 
approaches, whether of beast or man, this excited little 
bird sends out a warning cry so that his sluggish lazy 
friend the crocodile may slide under the mud out of 
danger. The zic-zac perches upon the crocodile’s back 
and picks off leeches to eat; sometimes he will even snatch 
a piece of food from between the reptile’s teeth! A 
traveller tells how the zic-zac, “in searching for the 
leeches, finds its way into the reptile’s mouth while the 
latter is basking on a sandbank, where it lies generally 
with the jaws wide open. Once in a while the crocodile 
falls asleep, when the jaws suddenly fall, and the zic-zac 
is shut up in the mouth. It straightway prods the croco¬ 
dile with its horny spurs, as if refreshing the memory of 
his reptilian majesty, who opens his jaws and lets his 
favorite leech-catcher free.” 

It is a far cry from our oak tree to the zic-zac on the 
banks of the Nile, but I want you to see how all over the 
world Nature’s web of life extends, linking animal and 
plant and earth and man. There are plants which move 
almost as though they were urged by animal instincts; 
Pimpernel, the Shepherd’s Weather-Glass, closes its 
petals if the sun goes behind a cloud. If you stop a 
moment I am sure you can think of a flower which 
“goes to sleep” at night. Flowers do not really go to 


the web oe ube 


87 


sleep, they have no need of sleep,—nor would you if, 
like the tulip, you remained all day waving gracefully 
upon a stalk! Perhaps the flowers close to keep warm 
on cold nights, perhaps they try to avoid the dew, or 
maybe they want to save their pollen from being spoiled 
by rain in wet weather. 

The only movement which most plants can make is this 
closing of their petals when the dark comes, but in tropi¬ 
cal countries there can be found a prickly shrub the 
leaves of which close when touched. For this reason it 
is called the Sensitive Plant; it grows a few feet high, 
bears purple flowers, and people like to cultivate it in 
hothouses to watch the leaf stalks droop and the leaf¬ 
lets fold up the minute it is touched. We do not know 
exactly why the Sensitive Plant has this power of move¬ 
ment, it does not frighten away browsing animals or 
other enemies, and repeated movements seem to tire the 
plant so that it becomes stunted in its growth, like a 
growing boy who is forced day after day to overwork 
his heart or his muscles. 

There are other plants, however, to which the power 
of movement means a great deal—it means their dinners 
and their suppers ! Not all plants live upon air and water 
like the rose, or feed upon their host as the mistletoe 
feeds upon the oak. Some plants live upon insects, and 
these they catch and kill by means of leaf movements. 


the: story of the: oak tre:f 



American Pitcher Plant 














































































































TH^ web OE TIEE 


89 


Down in the warm Caroline Islands, when careless Mrs. 
Fly touches one of the sensitive hairs upon the leaf of 
the plant called Venus Fly-trap, the two blades of the leaf 
snap together and Mrs. Fly is soon crushed, drowned 
in the sticky fluid and digested! Over in England Mrs. 
Fly must avoid the Common Sundew, or she will be 
caught in the sticky fluid of the leaf gland which will 
then fold over her and imprison her. In our own land the 
insects must be no less wary, or they will perhaps fall 
into the leaf pitchers of the Pitcher Plant and be 
drowned and digested like their brothers in Cochin-china! 

So you see that although a few animals and plants 
help each other, most of them are much more ready to 
devour their neighbors than to help them. This fierce 
and never-ending struggle for life is not a wicked de¬ 
sign of Mother Nature’s; on the contrary, it is what 
makes certain families of plants, certain kinds of animals, 
certain races of men, grow stronger and more beautiful 
from generation to generation. With so many enemies 
to fight, only the strongest, the cleverest, the best adapted 
can win the battle for life. 

In the beginning, perhaps the rose had no thorns, the 
cactus no needles, the adder no sting. Likely enough, 
the first giraffe had a neck no longer than a pony’s! But 
as the centuries advanced, the rose and the cactus, fear¬ 
ful of the trampling hoofs, the greedy jaws of wild 


90 


the: story OF thf oak tre:f 



Venus Fly-trap 






























































































































































































































THE WEB OB BIBE 


91 


animals, developed their horns and their needles; the 
adder with the deadliest sting lived longer and laid more 
eggs than her stingless sisters; the giraffe with the longest 
neck could reach higher leaves upon the tree in time of 
drought or famine when his shorter-necked brothers were 
starving because the pasture had burned dry with the sun. 

Plants and animals and men must struggle against 
disease, against attacking animals, against climate. The 
polar bear protects himself from the cold by growing 
thick, heavy fur; the African’s skin is dark so that the 
sun cannot burn it. Man, seeing the warfare that goes on 
forever among the creatures beneath him, often tries 
to turn this struggle to his own advantage, sometimes 
with success, often with failure. To kill the tent-worm, 
he brought the English sparrow to America; in fifty 
years these birds became so numerous as to be more 
harmful than the tent-worm, and we should like very 
much to send them all fllying back to where they came 
from! When before our very eyes the robins steal 
the makings of a cherry pie from the top of our cherry 
tree, we are very angry, but nobody dares to kill off the 
whole race of robins and sparrows because we should 
then be tormented and our trees and crops destroyed by 
the millions of insects upon which these birds feed. If by 
some dreadful accident all the birds in the world should 
die, in six or ten years all of our trees, our grasses and 


7 


92 


the: story OR the: OAK tre:e 


flowers, our gardens and our crops would come to an 
end. 

Every year man is learning more about Nature, with 
every generation he has more power over his surround¬ 
ings, dares tamper further with the elements, with the 
living secrets of Nature, than did his fathers, but he 
must be careful! In his heart man feels that he can 
conquer Nature, he can train her hosts, her battalions of 
living things to be his willing slaves—but not yet! The 
time is not yet come; man and boy and girl—all of us— 
must first watch and study and know and respect the 
armies of Nature; then she will give them to us for our 
use! 


CHAPTER XI 

More About the Web of Life—The Soil 


If I were to read a book, and I came to a chapter called 
“Soil/' I think I should be tempted to skip it, because 
“Soil” seems such a dull subject. How, I might ask, can 
anyone find a story in the soil ? 



Fossil Fish 


But there is a story in the soil. The soil, you know, is 
the topmost layer of the earth’s surface, and it is made 
of rocks, all crumbled and shaken and beaten to bits by 
time and tempest, by snow and ice and sleet and the fierce 
heat of the sun. You yourself have seen rocks crumble 
and flake. Rain and frost, sudden changes from heat 
to cold, cause the rocks to swell and shrink again so that 
small pieces are chipped off. Rain seeps into the rocks 
and melts some of the material holding them together so 
that the surface falls away in a loose, powdery mass. 
This has been going on for years and years, for ages and 





94 


THE) STORY OR THE) OAK TREE 


ages, so that these finely ground particles of rock form 
the main bulk of the soil covering the earth. If all the 
soil in your garden, if all the soil in America were swept 
into the sea, the bare rocks beneath would after long 
years become covered with soil by the weathering of the 
rocks beneath. 

Dig through the soil and the sub-soil, and you will 
strike rock, as you know. But not all soil is of the same 
nature as the rocks beneath. The soil in your garden 
may have been carried there by the great ice sheets which 
swept the earth thousands of years ago. Some was laid 
by rivers long since dried, a rich dark soil which makes 
fertile the valleys in which it lies. 

I cannot stop here to tell you the story of the earth. 
Mother Earth, so the books tell us, is fifty million years 
old, and in fifty million years she has had too many ad¬ 
ventures to put into this little chapter or this little book. 
And all the time the sun looked on—what a story he 
could tell! Unwinking, the sun watched our earth, a 
whirling mass of flaming gas, cool and harden to hot 
rock, to cool rock, to sea! He saw mountains levelled, 
plains thrown up into hills; as he watched, the sea be¬ 
came land, and the land sea. That warm Mediterranean, 
on the shores of which the young Grecian priests heard 
their destiny in the whispering leaves of the sacred oak 
of Dodona—that warm sea was once a fertile valley, 


THE WEB OE EIEE—THE SOII, 


95 


bright with trees and grass and flowers. The sun saw 
the first life arise upon the earth, mosses, ferns, gigan¬ 
tic trees, sponges, and blind sea creatures. Then he 
saw worms and shell-fish, back-boned animals with 
wings and limbs, birds, reptiles, mammals that suckled 
their young, and lastly, Man. 

Then he saw the great glaciers creep slowly south, and 
crawling inch by inch over the face of the earth, blast 
with their breath all these living things so that they died 
and, covered by the ice, were forgotten. 

How do we know all this ? We know it by the record 
of the rocks, wherein were imbedded the bones of these 
strange animals, and upon which lie the pictured outlines 
of many a leaf, many a shelled sea creature now unknown 
to man. We know it by the fossils, which are plants, tree 
trunks and even bones, turned to stone by time, and so 
preserved that we may therein read the history of the 
earth. 

Time after time life arose upon the land, only to be 
crushed again by the relentless onward sweep of the 
glaciers. The very last changes of level took place after 
the melting of the last ice sheet. Continents were 
drained, deserts laid in shifting sand, the soil settled into 
its final form and content, and living things began to 
shape themselves and adapt themselves to life in their 
particular climates. 


9 6 


THE} STORY OR THE OAK TRE}E} 


Here again we see another strong link in Nature’s Web 
of Life. It was the plants which prepared the dry land 
for animals. The barren land of those ancient times af¬ 
forded no food or shelter for animals; not until plants 
appeared could the creatures crawl out of the sea and 
carry on their great adventure of life upon the shore. 
And besides food and shelter and places to hide, the 
plants gave one more thing to the animals; perhaps you 
can guess what this was if you recall Chapter I, on “The 
Leaf.” Can you remember that magic fluid in the 
leaf, called “chlorophyll?” And do you remember the 
tree-breathing, or transpiration, by which the tree breathes 
in carbon dioxide and breathes out oxygen? Of course 
you do, and you remember also that oxygen in the air 
is necessary to keep the firels of life burning in us and in 
all animals. So plants gave oxygen to the animals. 

In the long run, then, all animals depend on plants, 
and all plants depend upon the soil. 

The soil is not dead. Although it looks as lifeless as 
a stone, it is filled with living creatures, insects, earth¬ 
worms, and tiny creatures called “bacteria” which are 
busy all day long making the soil fertile that your gar¬ 
dens may grow. These bacteria are as small as our 
old friend the ameba, but they are hard workers. When 
in autumn the leaves fall from the trees, when the 
green plants die, they disappear, but they are not wasted. 


the web OB EIBE—THE soie 


97 


They become part of the soil, they are buried and decay, 
and as they decay the bacteria change them into stuff 
called “nitrates” which enrich the soil. 

Even the soil is full of Nature’s magic! 

When the farmer complains that his crops will not 
thrive because his soil needs humus , he means it has not 
enough of this decaying green matter, and his crops are 
starving for want of proper food. He has to go and 
buy some humus which has been prepared by men, or 
he must let his fields lie idle, without sowing seeds for 
a year or two, so that’the bacteria may have a chance to 
work on the decaying green things ready at hand. 

How does the farmer know when he has found good 
soil? He knows by the color, and by the weight; he 
makes sure also that his fields will have a chance to get 
plenty of water, because he realizes, as you do, that of 
all things, plants most need water. Water not only feeds 
the plant, but it helps dissolve the soil-food and to carry 
it through the soil and up the roots into the living stem 
or trunk. Too much water, of course, like too much of 
anything, is bad for plants. A flooded field will kill the 
farmer’s wheat by closing up the pore-spaces or air¬ 
spaces in the soil; even roots must have air or they will 
suffocate. The flooded field, however, would not kill 
our oak, because our oak is strong enough to stand a 
great deal of hardship. 


98 


THE STORY OR THE OAK TREE 


Does it not seem strange that in a shovelful of soil, 
nearly half of the total volume is pore-space, this air¬ 
space between the particles of earth? 

The other day I watched the gardener plant some 
shrubs. First he dug his hole and put in a bush; then, 
when he had filled in the earth all round, he stamped it 
gently down with his foot. After he had watered it well 
he sprinkled loose earth over the firm soil; he told me 
this loose earth kept the water from evaporating into the 
air. He said that plants get their moisture from two 
sources, from the rain which falls from above, and from 
the ground water which rises from below—the water men 
find when they dig wells. It is a curious fact that when 
water finds tiny cracks or spaces in solid earth or rock, 
it is drawn upward to the soil where the roots of plants 
can drink it. The cracks must be very fine, though, 
finer than a hair, or the water will not follow them; that 
is why, the gardener said, that he scatters loose earth or 
straw over the trampled earth around his newly planted 
bushes. In this loose earth the cracks are too coarse to 
draw the water up where it will pass into the air, and 
so it remains in the soil where the plants need it. 

And now it is time to speak of one more link in the 
Web of Life, a strong link and an important one, al¬ 
though it is made by creatures we look down upon as 
the lowliest of all living things. There is a humble crea- 


the web oe IylBE —the soie 


99 


ture, not pretty to look upon, but which does a great 
service for the living world. 

This creature is the earthworm, and he makes the soil 
richer for plants, thereby helping man and beast. The 
earthworm lives in the soil, which he devours as he 
burrows through it. The earth passes through his body, 
and when it comes out it is richer than when it went in. 
He buries the dead leaves which, when they have been 
worked upon by the bacteria, make rich and ready food 
for the young plants of another spring. You and I know 
only one kind of earthworm, and he is never more 
than ten inches long, but there are more than a thousand 
kinds, each quite different from the other. In tropical 
countries people have seen worms from three to six 
feet long! 

The first person to study earthworms was Charles Dar¬ 
win, when he was a young student at Edinburgh, in Scot¬ 
land. A very queer subject for a student to choose, 
was it not? Yet this young student became one of the 
greatest men of the world, and what he learned about 
earthworms has been of much use to mankind. Young 
Charles Darwin would measure off a space upon the 
ground, then he would count the number of wormholes 
in this space, and figure out how many leaves these 
worms took down into their burrows. He found that in 
an acre of fine old fallow ground there may be half a 


IOO 


thk story or thr oak tree; 


million worms; they will eat almost anything they can 
get their skins over, so that in one acre of ground they 
pass ten tons of soil through their bodies every year. 
They have been doing this for millions of years; every 
bit of soil on the surface of the earth has passed through 
their bodies many times. 

Darwin found that the worms work chiefly by night, 
when he would see hundreds of them, “with tails fixed in 
their burrows, prowling round in circles,” and strongly 
resisting any effort to pull them out. “An age-long 
ploughing field which was so thickly covered with hard 
flints that it was known as ‘the stony field’ was left un¬ 
touched for thirty years, after which a horse could 
gallop from one end to another without ever striking a 
stone.” 

All his life Darwin continued this patient study, and 
when he was seventy-two, the year before he died, he 
published a book which proves that earthworms have 
made most of the fertile soil of the world. 

“When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse,” wrote 
Darwin—I have changed one or two of his words—“we 
should remember that its smoothness, on which so much 
of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the unevenness 
having been slowly leveled by worms. How marvelous 
to know that the whole of the top soil over any such ex¬ 
panse has passed, and will soon pass, every few years 


THE WEB OE EIEE—THE SOIE 


IOI 


through the bodies of worms. The plough is one of 
the most ancient and most valuable of man’s inventions ; 
but long before he existed the land was regularly 
ploughed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether 
there are many animals which have played so impor¬ 
tant a part in the history of the world, as have these 
lowly creatures.” 

Without earthworms the soil would soon become cold 
and hard, unfit for plants to grow in. 

Without bees the clover would die. 

Without birds the trees and plants would die, eaten by 
the myriad insects ready, if unchecked by birds, to swarm 
from the earth in a dark destroying cloud. 

Without plants the animals would starve—but this 
story could go on forever, like the story of “The House 
that Jack Built.” 

What have you seen that you can add to the story of 
Nature’s Web of Tife? 


CHAPTER XII. 

Wonders of Wood 


Think of what we make out of wood! 


We make— 
Railroad ties. 
Telegraph poles. 
Fences. 

Fence posts. 


Boxes. 

Crates. 

Excelsior for packing. 
Wood pulp for paper. 


We cut fire-wood to burn; we make frame houses with 
shingled roofs and all that goes under the roof! Look 
around you—how many wooden objects can you count? 
And the ships! Think of 



the Trojan galleys, centuries 
ago, their long oars flashing in 
the sun, the brown backs of 
the rowers glistening as they 
bent to their task. Think of 
the great Armada, that fleet 
of square-sailed Spanish gal- 


Woodsmen 


lows beaten so bravely by the English sailors of Queen 
Elizabeth—think of Columbus’ ship! A stout vessel she 
was, planked with oak; her masts were of oak, too, I 
think, cut from trees a hundred years old. Nowadays 
we need longer masts, so we find them among the tall, 
straight pine that grows in Oregon and along the shores 
of the Great Lakes or in Canada and Northern Maine. 



WONDERS OB' WOOD 


103 


Suppose you were Captain Jack Tar, and you had 
built a great schooner to sail across the sea. There she 
lies in the ship-yard, ready, all but her masts. There 
must be three of them, each a hundred feet high. Cap¬ 
tain Jack boards the train and he travels north, until one 
fine day he reaches the lumber camp. Brrrrr, but it is 
cold! Ten degrees below zero! The snow lies deep 
upon the ground, in the forest each tall pine wears a 
white and fluffy crown. 

“Come along, Jack Tar!” cry the woodsmen, and out 
from camp they all go, axe and saw in hand. 

“Ah!” says Jack, “Keep those three straightest pines 
for me!” And back he goes to sea, but the woodsmen’s 
work is only just begun. They have been in camp since 
early autumn, but no one grumbled when the snow came, 
because that made the rough logging roads smoother for 
heavy sled loads. They have hewn the branches from 
Jack’s masts now, and the three of them are ready to be 
hauled to the bank of a stream. But first the men troop 
back to camp for dinner; a good dinner it is, too, and 
they deserve it. Pierre, the big Canadian cook, is an 
important person in camp and knows that a man’s job 
cannot be done without plenty of good hot dinners. 

On Sundays the men can go in to the nearest town 
if they wish, but most of them stay in camp, resting and 
sleeping and telling yams. 


104 


the story or the oak tree 


Weeks pass, and months. On the banks of the stream 
where lie Captain Jack’s masts the water rises higher 
and higher as the ice breaks and the thaw begins. With 
cant hooks and peavies Jack’s logs, and hundreds like 
them, are flushed into the rushing water, and the drive 
to the saw-mill begins. 

And what a drive this is! For miles upon miles the 
great mass of timber rides easily upon the current, and 
the driver rides with them. Nimbly he leaps from log 
to log; pushing this log and turning that one, he guides 



Woodsmen Driving Cogs Down a Stream 


them upon their course. What he dreads most of all is 
to see his logs jam; that happens when somewhere one 
log gets twisted and blocks the passage so that the whole 










WONDERS OR WOOD 


105 


piles up in a booming, roaring mass which can be loosened 
only with dynamite. This means that Jack’s masts 
will be shattered and lost and with them hundreds of 
other precious logs, so when the driver sees this coming 
he forgets the danger of rushing, icy water and trusts 
the sharp spikes in his heavy boots to steady him as he 
runs forward and with a thrust of his pole loosens the 
key log which causes the trouble. 

On again moves the mass, on and on until, after a 
journey of many days—it might be weeks in Canada or 
the northwest—the driver shouts as he sees the saw- 
milll, and Jack’s masts pass from the water to the saw 
to be rounded into shape. From the mill they travel by 
train to Jack, waiting by the sea. Up go the masts, up 
fly the sails, off glides the great ship! 

Once I visited a saw mill. It was in Oregon, on the 
Pacific coast, and the logs which came into that mill 
were so big that if four of you joined hands, you could 
not have reached around one of them. In an airy room 
over the water screamed the whizzing saws, shining round 
wheels forged of steel no thicker than a silver dollar. 
Men did not spin them, but machinery; their sharp teeth 
sank through the wood as a knife goes through an apple. 

Do you know how many different kinds of saws there 
are? Ninety kinds, each with its own name; jump saw, 
wobble saw, foxtail saw, rabbit saw,—but if you want 


io6 


the: story of TH£ oak tre)e: 


to know any more, you must hunt for them in the 
dictionary. 

It is all very thrilling, this business of the river drive, 
but nowadays, I am afraid, men have thought out quicker 
and less romantic means to bring the timber to the saw 
mill. Only certain kinds of wood are light enough to 
float upon the stream, so men have built logging rail¬ 
roads, timber slides—which are toboggan slides for 
trees—and flumes and cable tramways. If you had been 
born in Canada at the beginning of this century and 
your father had been a woodsman, you might very likely 
have ridden on the logs yourself. In driving season 
your father would have taken you and your mother and 
brother and sister upon a raft made of big logs, on top 
of which he had built a shanty. There you would have 
lived and watched the tree-clad river banks slide by, 
while at noon-time the smoke curled from the tin chimney 
rising crookedly from the stove where your mother was 
cooking the dinner. In Germany, too, men drive such 
rafts down the Rhine river from the Black Forest to the 
Row countries at the river’s mouth. 

In our western forest land live men called “cruisers” 
or “landlookers.” These men have grown up among 
the forests, they know the trees for hundreds of miles, 
and they can guide lumber dealers to the finest trees ; 
in their pockets they carry little blank books containing 


WONDERS OF WOOD 


107 


forest maps which they made themselves, and you may 
be sure they are proud of these maps and careful to 
whom they show them. 

How would you like to be such a cruiser? 

Of course, in different parts of the country lumbering 
is done in different ways. But wherever trees grow, 
men are busy cutting them down; they are in such a 
hurry they do not stop to carry away the branches, much 
less to bundle the twigs into fagots for fire-wood like 
the thrifty Frenchmen. Indeed, I am afraid the Ameri¬ 
can woodsmen slash at our forests with little mercy, 
leaving behind them a dreary waste of blackened stumps 
where the birds will never come again. 

The trouble is, we have not forgotten the feelings 
our forefathers had about the forests. To the pioneer 
the forest was an enemy; it hemmed him in on every 
side, for hundreds of miles it stood between him and 
the cities he had left behind. Before he could build 
his log cabin and plough his field he must make a clear¬ 
ing in the forest; what cared he if the felled trees rotted 
on the ground? The forests, he thought, were limitless, 
endless; he would not have believed if someone had 
told him that in a hundred years people would be 
wondering where they could find wood enough to build 
their homes. 


8 


io8 


the: story or the: oak treje: 


A forest trail! Modern city folks have forgotten what 
that really means. Often it was not even a footpath, just 
a number of landmarks the traveler must look sharp to 
find,—a queerly shaped rock, a dead tree, a spring. 
Even to-day the natives of our northern forest lands 
are terrified at the thought of losing themselves in the 
woods. If a man is lost in the forest for more than 
three days they say he will go crazy. Of course, he will 
get well when he is found, but for a time he will have 
had a very dreadful sensation. Not cold, not hunger 
oppressed him so much as loneliness; about him on ail 
sides stretched the trees in endless, gloomy ranks; not a 
friendly sound could his straining ears catch, only the 
call of strange birds and the rustle of the thicket as 
some startled beast leaped out and away. 

No wonder our forefathers learned to wield an axe, 
no wonder each felled tree to them meant victory! 

The Yankee axe is the finest in all the world. Its 
head is forged of sharpest steel, its handle of toughest 
hickory—a tree, by the way, which grows only in 
America. And if the Yankee axe takes first prize, so 
does the Yankee woodsman; the sons and grandsons of 
our hardy pioneers an axe as an Italian wields his 
stone-cutting tools, with strength and skill. 

We are proud of these backwoods forefathers of 
ours. They were strong and brave and ambitious; noth- 


WONDERS QE WOOD 


109 


ing daunted them, not cold, nor hunger, nor savages, not 
loneliness nor the stubbornness of untilled soil. Why, 
our greatest American was a backwoodsman! Who was 
he, and how did he look? His long arms could split 
rails with the best of them, yet he was wiser than men 
brought up in cities. 

Who was he? 

Abraham Lincoln! 

The day of the pioneer is past, but in our forests the 
axe still rings, the trees crash shivering to earth, and 
in our snug homes we think of the woodsmen who felled 
the trees for our fine furniture, our polished floors, our 
panelled walls and shingled roofs. 


CHAPTER XIII 


Our Beautiful Forests 

Those were splendid lives our pioneer forefathers led, 
and what made them dare so far and toil so hard was 
the knowledge that the land they cleared belonged to 
them, the fields they ploughed were their very own; in 
the New World people were so few and land so plenti¬ 
ful it could be had for the asking, it was free. 

Because the land was free our fathers came to 
America. In England the forests were far from free; 
they were owned by the king, by rich lords who were 
often cruel to their peasant tenants. Do you remember 
that old oak tree in our first chapter, the one we said 
was a sapling when William the Norman conquered 
England? That tree must have seen deeds done which 
dried the very sap in his young limbs. He saw poor 
people oppressed, driven from their homes, maimed or 
blinded for no greater crime than the killing of a stag 
to make meat for hungry children. In those days, you 
understand, a forest meant more than trees, it was a 
big slice of country containing not only woodland, but 
pastures and villages. To his rich landlord every peas¬ 
ant paid his tax, money or perhaps a sheep or fowl. 
Although hundreds of fine deer and other game abounded 
in the forest, if the peasant took bow and arrow to 


OUR BEAUTIFUL FORESTS 


III 


kill a deer he was punished more terribly than we punish 
our worst crimnals, he was tortured or put to death. 
Because it was the king’s pleasure to hunt in the forest 
he would not spare even one stag for the poor man’s 
food. The peasant could not so much as gather brush¬ 
wood for his fire, much less cut down a tree; he could 
let his cows graze on the land, but not sheep or geese or 
swine, and if his cows nibbled enough to deprive the 
king’s beasts of food, the poor man’s cattle were taken 
from him. 

There were plenty of officers to enforce these cruel 
laws; there were foresters and gamekeepers, rangers, 
woodwards, regarders and verderers. Every forty days 
the verderers held court; the peasants were tried and 
thrown into prison until the grand Court of Justice 
should meet, which it did every three years. It was a 
lucky poacher who escaped with two ears from before 
those cruel judges. 

And then came Robin Hood, outlawed Earl of Hunt¬ 
ingdon, to roam the forest with his brave band, right¬ 
ing the wrongs of the oppressed, robbing the rich to 
give to the poor. Do you remember the story of Will 
Scarlet, one of Robin’s men, how he saved a poor 
widow’s boy from the gallows, how in so doing he was 
caught himself by the Sheriff of Nottingham, and how 
Robin’s men in turn saved Will? 


II2 


the; story ot the: oak tree; 


All this was long ago, of course, nearly a thousand 
years before our time, but doesn’t it make you glad to 
know you live in a free land? Our government owns 
thousands of miles of glorious forests, wooded moun¬ 
tains, hills and streams. These lands are kept untouched 
for the pleasure, not of rich lords, but of common peo¬ 
ple. There is Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, 
Yosemite Park in California, the Grand Canyon of 
Arizona, and many others which I hope you may one 
day see. If you are an eastern boy or girl and have 
never seen the big trees of California, ask your teacher 
to show you a picture of that giant redwood which is 
so big around that an automobile can drive right through 
its trunk! 

These parks are vast playgrounds where grownups 
and their children can carry tents and camp out and have 
all kinds of good times. Nobody is allowed to cut down 
a tree or kill a wild animal in these beautiful places. 

But beside their beauty and the value of their lumber, 
forests are very useful things. All these leaves with 
their faces turned like so many umbrellas to the sun 
shade the soil so the heat cannot bum the richness out 
of it. The tree roots hold the soil in place, keeping it 
from shifting or sliding downhill, holding back flooded 
streams which would otherwise drown the farmed fields 
in the surrounding country. Rocky soil never brings 


OUR BEAUTIFUL FORESTS 113 

a rich harvest, and tree roots, by forcing their way 
through cracks in the rocks, break up the stone and 
make an easier job for the earthworms. 

Forest earth is full of decaying leaves and stalks, and 
you already know that makes the very best soil. In 
the swampy southlands the mangrove tree even makes 
soil where before was only water. The mangrove seed 
begins to grow while it is still attached to the mother 
tree, by the time it falls to the water it is a young plant 
which can easily find foothold on some coral reef. 
There it grows and spreads and forms a swamp which 
soon attracts other living plants. Then appears the 
cocoanut tree, and that means there is enough soil under 
foot for man to live upon. Thousands of miles of sea 
waste have been turned to land by the work of this 
wonderful tree. 

Forests act as windbreaks. If a grove of trees stands 
between your field and the north wind, your crops will 
not be broken to earth in the storm. 

How clean and sweet is the air among pine trees! 
Once I spent the night on the edge of such a forest, 
sleeping upon sweet-smelling pine needles. The spring 
water we had in that mountain camp was the purest 
and clearest I ever drank, and so it always is with forest 
springs. 


1 14 THE story of the oak tree 

Knowing the beauty and usefulness of our forests, 
should we not do all we can to keep them? Yet we do 
just the opposite. Our lumber dealers cut down mil¬ 
lions of trees every year, never bothering to plant new 
ones in their stead, so that our America is fast losing 
her beautiful mantle of trees,—those same trees our 
pioneer fathers called enemies, but which we now know 
as our best friends. 

But beside the man with the axe, our forests have 
other and worse enemies. Fires destroy miles upon 
miles of trees every year; have you ever caught the keen 
scent of pine smoke? It carries on the wind for miles; 
k native of Wisconsin told me he smelt burning pine in 
his city home, miles from the forest. 

There is a greedy army which night and day seeks to 
lay waste the forests—the army of insects. One thou¬ 
sand different kinds of insects live upon the oak trees of 
our country. Some eat the roots, some burrow into the 
trunk, others, called “leaf rollers” and “leaf runners” 
devour the leaves. There are back-boring beetles, flat¬ 
headed borers, and caterpillars by the million ready to 
pounce on the luscious green. One, a big shiny black 
and red fellow called the forest-tent caterpillar, does 
more harm to oak forests than all other kinds of cater¬ 
pillars put together. 


OUR BEAUTIFUL FORESTS 115 

Trees get sick the same as people, and they show it, 
too. They change color, they look “spotty/’ they get a 
temperature. When a deer or a goat or rabbit nibbles 
the bark off a young tree, letting insects burrow inside 
the tender cambium, the tree gets wound fever; some¬ 
times trees with thin bark even sunburn as you do when 
you go without a hat in summer. Think how un¬ 
comfortable the city trees must be when the pavement 
is laid close around their trunks; the hard cement chokes 
off the water, it flattens and twists the roots. Every 
time I see such a tree I want to fetch a pick-axe and 
break away the cruel pavement. 

Trees have their troubles, and there are tree doctors 
to cure them. On my neighbor’s lawn stands a beauti¬ 
ful chestnut tree, insects attacked it and rotted it until 
the trunk was almost hollow and the tree was ready to 
die. Then tree doctors came and cleaned out that hole 
and filled it with cement as neat as any dentist fills a 
tooth; they saved its life, and my neighbor’s children 
can have their roasted chestnuts as before. 


9 


CHAPTER XIV 

The Man with the Microscope 

I 

When we look at Charles Darwin’s picture and im¬ 
agine him bending that grave, kindly face over the 
microscope, we wonder whether he didn’t have to take 
his great bushy beard by the end and tie it to one ear 10 
get it out of the way! But beard or no beard, look into 
the microscope he did, and found wonders there greater 
than a crystal gazer ever saw. He looked at bugs and 
beetles, worms and flies, sea animals and land animals, 
plants, leaves and grasses. He learned the habits of 
creatures that creep and crawl and fly and run, and, as 
he watched, he put two and two together and discovered 
the Web of Life, the relation between all living things. 
He discovered how living things grow and adapt them¬ 
selves to changes of climate, why the duck has webbed 
feet and the lizard has eyes on the top of his head, why 
man alone of all creatures walks on two legs instead 
of four. 

Of course, Nature would not have told these secrets 
to Darwin had she not known him to be patient and kind 
and a lover of everything alive. He used to walk alone 
in the woods, watching the life about him; he went so 
quietly that once three young squirrels ran up his 


the: man with the: microscope: 117 



Charles Darwin 


back and legs while their mother barked in terror from 
a tree. He had a sharp eye for birds’ nests and could 
find them when nobody else could, but he never de- 








Il8 the story or the oak tree 

stroyed the eggs nor carried away more than one. He 
lived in a big house in the country with Mrs. Darwin 
and their nine children and Polly, his favorite dog. 
Polly was a little white fox terrier who loved her master 
dearly and always seemed to know when he was going 
on a journey. Then she would mope and whine and 
cry, and when her master came home again she would 
go almost wild with delight, panting, squeaking, rush¬ 
ing around the room, jumping on and off chairs until 
he would stoop down and press her face to his. Polly 
used to tremble and put on an air of misery when her 
master went by to show that her dinner was late and 
she was hungry. Then Mr. Darwin would throw her 
crackers to catch on her nose. 

Even when he was a boy, Charles Darwin began to 
study nature. He used to collect beetles; finding a new 
beetle was to him like finding a gold nugget! He kept 
on with his beetle-hunting while he was in college. 

“One day,” wrote Darwin, “tearing off some old bark, 
I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then 
I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to 
lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand 
into my mouth. Alas! it spat forth some dreadfully 
bitter fluid, which burnt my tongue so I was forced to 
spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third 
one.” 


THE MAN WITH THE MICROSCOPE H9 

I would never have put that beetle in my mouth, no 
matter how much I wanted it—would you? But this 
boy was so eager about beetle-hunting, as he was about 
everything he undertook, that in after life he could re¬ 
member posts, old trees and banks where he had made a 
good capture. He was a capital shot with a gun, and 
so fond of the sport that the first time he brought down 
a snipe his hands trembled so with excitement that he 
could hardly reload his gun. In his room at college he 
would ask his roommate to wave about a lighted candle; 
then he would fire at it with blank cartridges, and if his 
aim was correct the puff of wind would blow out the 
candle. Darwin was never caught at this trick, but one 
day a teacher remarked, 

“What a queer thing it is, Mr. Darwin seems to spend 
hours in cracking a horsewhip in his room, for I often 
hear the crack when I pass under his window!” 

When he was a school boy Charles Darwin had many 
friends. He says himself that he must have been a 
very simple fellow when he first went to school, and in 
his life history he tells how one of his school mates 
fooled him. 

A boy named Garnett took him into a cake shop and 
bought cakes, but did not pay for them. As the boys 
walked out, Garnett put his hand to his hat and moved 
it in a certain way. When Darwin asked why the shop- 


120 


the: story of the oak tree 


keeper had let them go without paying, Garnett replied 
that his uncle had left money to the town on condition 
that anyone who wore his hat and moved it in a certain 
way was to be given whatever he wished. The truth was 
that the boy’s father was known at the shops and the 
shopkeepers trusted him to pay promptly. Garnett re¬ 
peated this in another shop, and then sent Darwin into a 
third, lending him the old hat. Of course, when Darwin 
moved his hat and turned to go without paying, the 
shop-keeper ran after him and gave him a trouncing, 
while the mischievous Garnett stood by and laughed. 

I could tell many more stories about Darwin’s boy¬ 
hood, how he could beat the other boys at swimming 
races, how dogs would come to him from their masters, 
how when walking along a wall in a day-dream he fell 
off, how his father said to him when he was sixteen, 

“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat- 
catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all 
your family.” 

The most interesting of all is the story of his voyage 
around the world in the Beagle, a small sailing vessel 
which took five years to make the trip. Darwin was 
twenty-one when they set out and sometimes he used to 
get pretty homesick, but he collected stones and bones 
and beetles to his heart’s content, and learned many facts 
which were useful to him in later life. He was study¬ 
ing the rocks then, and tells how when the ship reached 


THE MAN WITH THE MICROSCOPE 


121 


port he would hurry ashore and clamber over the moun¬ 
tains with his hammer to learn by the sound what kind 
of stones they were, and what part they had played in 
the record of the rocks. 

As he grew older Darwin became an invalid; he 
suffered very much, but he did not let his suffering in¬ 
terfere with his work. He wrote books about the facts 
he learned from nature; never satisfied to be told that 
something was true, he had to experiment and find out 
for himself. All our natural acts had for him a mean¬ 
ing, he wanted to know why we blush when we are em¬ 
barrassed, why we start when we are frightened. One 
day at the “Zoo” he put his face close to the thick plate 
glass in front of a puff adder, having first decided that 
he would not start back if the snake struck at him, but 
as soon as the blow was struck he forgot all about his 
intentions and jumped backwards a yard or two as 
quickly as possible; he knew then that sudden fear is 
stronger than a man’s mind. 

By the time Darwin’s beard was grey he was known 
over half the world, and like all great men, he had his 
enemies as well as his friends. He died in 1882, and if 
•you want to know what he learned from all his study 
you can read it from his own books when you go to 
High School, because although he was so learned, his 


122 


THE STORY OF THE OAK TREE 


books are not full of long words but are simply written 
so that everyone can enjoy them. 

II 

When Charles Darwin the Englishman was no longer 
young, there was born in Massachusetts a little baby 
who when he grew up was to be known everywhere as 
the “plant wizard,” because he could help Nature to 
create plants that she could not make alone. 

This baby’s name was Euther Burbank, and he had 
barely learned to smile before he began to show his love 
for flowers. If anyone gave him a flower he would lie 



Luther Burbank 

In his cradle holding it tenderly in his tiny fingers, never 
crushing or dropping it, but keeping it until it faded or 
<iied. One day his sister gave him a daisy, and after he 


THE MAN WITH THE MICROSCOPE 


123 


had held it earnestly for some time, the petals fell off. 
With his fat baby fingers he tried patiently to put each 
petal back in place. When old enough to toddle he 
chose flowers for pets instead of animals; he used to 
carry in his arms a lobster cactus in a pot. Now I, for 
one, never saw a lobster cactus, and it does not sound 
very pretty to me, not nearly as dainty as a primrose 
or a daffodil. Perhaps you know better, but at any rate 
little Luther Burbank loved his lobster cactus so much 
that when one day he fell and broke the pot and plant 
he grieved over it as another child would weep over a 
lost bird or dog. Perhaps it was the rememberance of 
this broken cactus that made him create, when he was 
a man, a wonderful cactus plant without any prickles, 
good food for man and beast. 

Luther Burbank’s boyhood was very different from 
Charles Darwin’s. Darwin’s parents had money enough 
to send him to the best schools and colleges, Burbank 
was poor and had to go to work when he was still a 
boy. He worked in a factory until he had scraped to¬ 
gether a few dollars, enough to start market-gardening 
and seed-raising. One day he noticed a peculiar seed- 
ball on the green top of one of his potato plants. 

“Fine!” thought he, “Here is a new kind of potato. 
I’ll watch this seed-ball and make sure the seeds are 
planted safely.” 


124 


the; story of the; oak trff 


Alas, a few days later the ball was gone! Burbank 
hunted high and low until he found it on the ground 
over by the fence where some dog had rolled it; he put 
the seeds in the ground, and from them came the 
famous Burbank potato, which I am sure you have eaten 
for your dinner like hundreds of other boys and girls. 

Burbank worked so hard in his garden that one 
scorching July day he had a sunstroke. This made him 
very sick; he was twenty-one then, and said he to him¬ 
self, 

“I am going west to California where the air is mild 
and the breezes soft, and gardens grow more quickly 
than in Massachusetts.” So to California he went, but 
he did not find life easy. He took any odd job he could 
get; for a time he cleaned chicken coops on a chicken 
ranch, and he was paid so little he had to sleep at night 
in the chicken house. After awhile he found work in 
a factory, but he was still so poor he could only afford 
to sleep in a damp room over a steaming hot-house 
where his clothes were wet day and night. Of course 
he became very ill, so ill that he would have died had 
not a good woman—herself poor—saved his life by 
bringing him fresh milk every day from her cow. When 
he was well enough he worked again from job to job, 
but he had better luck now and was able to save a little 
money. With this money he bought a small plot of 


THE MAN WITH THE MICROSCOPE 


125 


ground and planted the first trees of a tree nursery 
which was to become famous all over the country. 

So Burbank went on raising trees and selling them, 
and the more he sold the more he planted. This took 
more money than he was able to make, so that he was 
always in need of cash to widen his business. He was 
as honest as your own father, but he was such a modest, 
bashful young man that he could not persuade the banks 
to lend him money. One day when he was digging away 
in his garden, wondering how on earth he was going 
to pay next month’s bills, he saw a team of horses 
coming down the road, driven by a neighboring farmer 
whom everybody knew to be a miserable old miser. 
Imagine Burbank’s surprise when the team drew up 
beside him and the old farmer began. 

“Young man, I notice you’re always tending to busi¬ 
ness. Need a little extra cash once in a while?” 

And what did that farmer do but lend Burbank two 
hundred dollars without so much as asking for a 
promise! 

At last fortune smiled on Luther Burbank, and he 
began to succeed. When his tree nursery earned for 
him ten thousand dollars a year, he shocked all of his 
friends by selling it. He said he was tired of raising 
trees just to sell them and make money, he wanted to 
spend his time making new plants and new trees and 


126 


the: story of thf oak trff 


new flowers; he wanted to cross-breed and cross-ferti¬ 
lize and play tricks with pollen that he alone knew how 
to play. 

We have already spoken of some of the wonderful 
plants and flowers created by Burbank. It is said of 
him that he has done more in a generation in creating 
new and useful plants than Nature, unaided, could have 
done in a million years—more, indeed, than Nature, un¬ 
aided, would ever have accomplished. The flowers and 
fruits of California are less wonderful than the flowers 
and fruits which Mr. Burbank has caused to grow. 

Charles Darwin and Luther Burbank were very differ¬ 
ent kinds of men. Perhaps we ought not to call Luther 
Burbank “the man with the microscope,” because he 
spent very little time with books and microscopes; his 
days were spent in the garden working with his hands, 
and he gave to the world actual fruits and flowers which 
we can see and taste and enjoy. Darwin was the stu¬ 
dent, he was the real “man with the microscopehe 
too worked with his hands, but mostly with his brain,— 
and there was a very mighty brain behind that high 
forehead! 

Different men work in different ways to understand 
Nature and to help living things. Darwin was one, 
Burbank another; then there was the monk Mendel who 
planted and thought all alone in his convent garden; 


the: man with the microscope 


127 


there were the Frenchmen Cuvier and Lamarck, the 
German brothers Muhler, Agassiz the Swiss who lived 
in Massachusetts, and many others whose stories I 
should like to tell. They were patient men, and brave, 
and kind; in them the spirit of adventure ran high; 
theirs was the courage of a Francis Drake, a Captain 
Kidd, only instead of slashing around the world with 
swords, they stayed at home and found high adventure 
there. 

All honor to the Man with the Microscope who con¬ 
quers, not ships nor men nor gold, but Nature! 












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